


Revenant

by mirroredsakura



Category: Compilation of Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VII
Genre: Canon deviation, Epic, F/M, M/M, Multi, Multiples, non-compilation compliant
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-01-16
Updated: 2020-02-20
Packaged: 2021-02-24 17:22:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 33,260
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22281637
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mirroredsakura/pseuds/mirroredsakura
Summary: Just because I'm gone doesn't mean I'm just going to let go. I won't. Not when they still need me. Not ever. Z/A/C/S An epic hero story of a soldier who rose to First Class, and who just can't stay dead and gone.
Relationships: Aerith Gainsborough/Cloud Strife, Aerith Gainsborough/Sephiroth, Sephiroth/Cloud Strife, Zack Fair/Aerith Gainsborough, Zack Fair/Cloud Strife, Zack Fair/Sephiroth
Comments: 8
Kudos: 24





	1. Dead Man's Oath

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Revenant (v1.5)](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/551086) by mirroredsakura. 



> Once upon a very long time ago (circa 2006), this was a Nanowrimo fic. It was long, sprawling, and yeah, not too bad, but it jumped all over itself as I pretty much threw all the word vomit I had at the screen. But I couldn't let go of it. It was my baby, and it still is. It got a face-lift, and that was good, but I wanted something fleshed out, not just pretty words. Now I've got rambly kid adventures, Wutai shenanigans, a look at these complicated friendships we only took as read but never really explored. Long, rambly, character-centric out the wing-wang, it's my kinda story. I hope it'll be yours too.

_\--Did you ever believe it’d last?--_

Zack Fair, SOLDIER First Class. Once upon a time that was all I ever wanted to be.

Then I met a girl. It sounds like a punchline, but lemme tell you, things just went uphill from there. 

See, I met a girl more generous than the gods, with eyes like summer and a heart that could make any house a home.

I met a man I would’ve followed into the Halls of Hel herself, and I’d’ve done it singing.

I met a boy who needed me, truly needed me, and yet every day I watched him become a better man than I knew I could ever be.

Gods help me, if you could know what it took to try to hold onto it all… 

All I know is... I tried. Heartsworn. Tried hard to believe — tried to make them _all_ believe — that it could work, that what we had could last, and that I’d always be there for them.

That’s the thing, y’know, I _wonder_. How much did I hurt them, when boys in Shinra blue gave my words the lie?

My parents never understood. They wouldn’t, Gongaga-born and raised. Thought I just went all wrong - _Midgar sickness_ , they call it. All that corrupt city living; the booze and the Honeybees. You hear ‘em talk about me, I’m sure I’m still just their SOLDIER, First Class, full stop. No heart for other things at all. 

But hell, I had heart. Maybe too much. Heart and soul, and a deep-down-in-the-gut _knowing_ that there were things that mattered more than the job. Somehow, there were four of us. Whatever. In the end, they were all that mattered and they were all I had left.

Would it’ve helped if we tried for something different, something normal? Maybe. Would it have changed anything? 

Gods, we’ll never know, will we? 

\--But that’s spilled milk now. I gotta remember that or it’s gonna eat me up inside.

I guess what’s important is that before the end, we were family. Truly. We had that, even if it was only for a little while. The kind where you didn’t need wedding rings or matching towels, it just was. 

Aeris needed grounding, something to hold onto in the here and now. Cloud needed people to believe in him so that he could start believing in himself. Sephiroth needed to know that everything about him was already amazing, and that it was okay to be just a man who could do such amazing things.

Me? Hel, I needed people to care about, to love me - because I was all of those things, really. Maybe I couldn’t talk to the voices in my head, but I knew something about restlessness. I knew something about needing to soak in other people’s attention though I never let it consume me. And sure, I never felt like a monster even in SOLDIER, but arrogance prowled at Sephiroth’s elbow long before he went to Nibelheim… and I knew a lot about thinking way too highly of myself.

All of that doesn’t keep you warm at night unless you’ve got somebody who can balance it all out. I had three. And all of them seemed to see things in me that I never knew were there.

It worked. We _fit_. We were some mismatched jigsaw puzzle that still made a picture. Everyone else could see it if they wanted to - and I’ll never stop being grateful just how many people did - but we only saw each other.

Who knows? Three Shinra goons and a flower girl the Turks desperately wanted but pretended they didn’t? If we’d made it, if we’d _won_ … you don’t think about how different things could have been, but they were possible once. 

Now the boys know better - SOLDIERs don’t really get to give up the blues, not while you’re still sound of mind and body. But back then the SOLDIER program was a trial run, a work in progress. Maybe you can’t imagine General Sephiroth living out his post-war days in honorable retirement, but we could. Back then, you didn’t know what was possible. It didn’t seem so laughable, wanting things. 

You’re going to actually laugh at what we wanted. Some little piece of proper ranch country, far away from the Plate and all the uniforms on it or under it. Baby chocobos underfoot. A garage big enough for us all to have souped-up sport bikes and a car nice enough for the General but with enough trunk space to shuttle produce and baked goods in a pinch. Shit, I’d even take a white picket fence.

Sephiroth would phase quietly out of active duty with a caseful of clinky medals and a letter of support for his successor. He would head a militia, not a military, ranging the hills to keep the monsters at bay. 

You can’t even imagine it - I can see it in your eyes. But Aeris would’ve had her garden, a real one under sun and sky. Cloud and Seph would have their birds, and they’d know what it meant to sit back and _smile_ … 

\--The good kind. I’ve seen Sephiroth since then, and I’ve seen that… smile. That’s not him. That’s not how it was. 

Would it have been better? I can’t say. With an ambitious leech like Shinra slopping its mako-sucking tentacles over every continent it could touch, it would’ve had to end eventually, right? If a power company could take over the world and suck it dry until the Planet fused into a gigantic ball of glass…

I wonder if we would’ve lived to see it.

Who knows? Knowing Shinra, they’d still want their precious standing military marching around just to keep the peace. Can’t have the people getting any independent thoughts on their own. That’d be _dangerous_.

Maybe it’s the ultimate selfishness but I’m that guy. I’m not that perfect. I wanted it, truly, just not to be our problem. Let the President ruin the world, but please, let me give them this slice of happiness. 

\--You see why I told you flat out I think Cloud’s the better man, right? Down in his heart, he’s got that bright, shiny core of save-the-world-do-gooder-ism. He’d be leading the show, trying to fix the Planet, no matter how happy we were. Me... by the end, I really only wanted to fight if it meant it’d be for hearth and home.

You know, they talk about Aeris now as though she’s some kind of saint. If I’m honest, that… doesn’t sound like my girl. If she is, I know in my bones that that’s all Cloud’s doing. Honest. He brought out the best in us. I know he thinks it was all me but, man… I don’t think he ever knew how much I really just wanted to impress him with my doofy Zack self. 

He did a number on Sephiroth himself, don’t think he didn’t. Time was when the General was obsessed with perfection, with proving himself, showing Hojo over and over how much he could accomplish on his own merit, not just because of how he came to be. He was driven, determined in a way that worried me, and I watched a climb up the corporate ladder I knew he hated. Could you truly take a man like the General and cage him behind a desk forever?

Maybe not, but when Cloud was there and looked at him like the gods had fashioned no one better… I didn’t have to worry. Sephiroth never seemed to feel that deep-seated drive to _accomplish_ whenever Cloud was there. It was enough. What he was. What we had. It was good and it was enough.

And then it all went up in a flaming village and an alien monster ate up the mind of my best friend and spat out a stranger. 

The whole world went to hell. Things happened that can never, never be fixed. Death doesn’t fix how damn hard that hits you. It makes you think, it makes you question every last thing. 

What could I have done? 

What more could I have tried to do?

I realized the ugly truth. Back then? Not a damn thing. The fates just stack the deck against you sometimes. 

But now? 

It hurt enough to fail Seph once. It hurts more to know that in the end, I failed them all. I _died._

\--I’m not gonna let that happen again. 


	2. This Is How It Was

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This is what it means to make it into SOLDIER 1st Class. This is how much you give up. This is how much you gain. (split in two parts because it long af)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Most, if not all of this fic was written prior to the release of Crisis Core so this fic has pretty much made up a different (and in some cases better ;) background history for our intrepid heroes. But I do occasionally borrow liberally from it. For example, SOLDIER uniforms in this chapter therefore follow the conventions from FFVII but I take the Crisis Core idea that the upper classes have a little more choice in the matter. Still, the Wutain War has been written to suit my own ends in this fic, and unfortunately, pretty as they are, Genesis and Angeal just didn't make the cut. 
> 
> References to Norse mythology abound, but they're mostly indirect, cultural-y stuff 'cause I just like it that way.
> 
> I also want to note that I am not an expert in any and all things military. I know that. I'm quite as sure as you that Zack and Sephiroth would nooooottttt have the relationship that they do in this story if they occupied any sort of similar IRL positions, but... I guess... that's what you get when you've got a despotic power company running your military instead of your government, right? Right???
> 
> Well, I take shameless liberties. This is known.

“Are you lost?”

Zack turned, slinging his duffel over one shoulder as he did so. _Finally,_ he thought. The guide had taken over _three hours_ to show up. He wasn’t gonna be looking at a big tip after this, not if Zack had anything to say about it. Some little street urchin had already tried to palm his wallet. _Twice_.

\--That is… if you tipped Shinra guides. You never knew with upper-Plate city folk, it might be _offensive_.

The moment he completed his turn though, Zack knew he couldn’t get grumpy at this skinny wisp of a girl. Was _she_ the guide Shinra had sent out? _Had_ to send out, in fact, since he’d been told that _under no circumstances_ was he to try getting to the Shinra building on his own?

(Shinra hadn’t said it in the official dispatch, but the recruiter had leaned in with an uncomfortable smile after he’d given his heavy pro-army pitch and muttered something about how the locals weren’t all too friendly or something.)

Well, after several hours walking laps around a train station where no one’d even bothered to make eye contact, much less talk to him, he could believe it. ‘Course he’d been led to believe it was just out of concern that someone with a shitty sense of humor was going to lead him off the wrong way... not jump him in the streets.

In their defense, he’d taken a good look at what life looked like under the Plate in the last few hours. After being offered a greasy newspaper cone of deep-fried shredded Raijincho from a dank side-street vendor with three front teeth (all of them in some late stage of decay), he couldn’t really blame the locals for getting angry. Some of ‘em were munching on monsters and forgetting the sight of sunlight every damn day of their lives… while only a short drive straight up they were bulldozing vegetable gardens to make way for public monuments.

Well, late or not, she was the first human being to take notice of him, and that was worth smiling about. “Thanks, doll. You the one who’s gonna take me up to Shinra? I’m signing up for the army.” 

She blinked. The girl was all eyes… huge and green in her thin little face, half hidden beneath a mop of long brown hair, though most of it was scraped up in a ponytail that hung all the way down her back. Zack wondered if she’d ever cut it, it was that long. 

Her turquoise dress was tight around the shoulders and the skirt was starting to get too short, making her long, skinny legs look even longer and skinnier. Quickly giving a furtive look around her, she stepped closer, waving a hand at his face, and made a shushing noise at him.

Which… he didn’t like all that much, to be honest. No thirteen-year-old likes being shushed, particularly if you’ve lied about your age, run away from home, and made a beeline straight for Shinra and SOLDIER without looking back.

And _especially_ not by some tiny bit of a girl with mismatched socks and dirt on her nose. 

But she was tugging on his arm and starting to walk, trying to pull him after her. “The guides are on a six-hour rotation, like clockwork,” she explained, “It’ll be hours before anyone else is going to come looking for you. Come on, I’ve got something to show you.” 

Zack had heard the obligatory, and somewhat half-hearted lesson “don’t listen to strangers!” from his parents before, but he was from Gongaga, and there wasn’t a whole lot of town around Gongaga to find strangers lurking around. Like, there was the reactor, and the soldiers that came by once in a while to check up on it, but everyone flocked out to ‘em when they did come anyway, just to have someone new to talk to. 

Now monsters, _monsters_ you got plenty of warnings about. No corner of the Planet was ever completely free of their local flavor of nasty birds, beasts, or metal freaks and Gongaga was no exception. Stuff could get nasty the further you went out of town, especially the closer you got to the reactor.

Not that Zack ever really listened to those rules either. He’d bagged his first Beach Plug (yeah, that still sounded wrong to him too) when he was ten, though he’d've probably lost a finger in that particular adventure if Ellie Linden hadn’t snitched a Restore materia from her father earlier that day just to keep him out of trouble. 

(She was also the first girl he’d ever kissed; he was _such_ a sucker for a pretty girl who had his back and took the job seriously to boot.)

So yeah, but all that wasn’t because he was downright _stupid_. Zack dug in his heels stubbornly and forced her to turn around. “And where exactly is that?”

She hadn’t made one move for his wallet yet, but that didn’t mean he shouldn’t be careful. Some little girls had _friends_ in the slums. The kind with tire irons and a predilection for brass knuckles.

She made a face at the hold-up, but obliged by leaning in and whispering urgently into his ear, “You shouldn’t be talking about Shinra so loudly right now. Some of the big kids were killed by patrols last night. They say it’s for fighting and resisting arrest but…” she shook her head, sighing, “they didn’t have anything! No guns, no weapons, not even a pencil! But they were shot… so many times. The stationmaster’s daughter was one of the… one of the ones who didn’t make it. Her name was Lily.” 

He glanced at the man she nodded to out of the corner of his eye: a portly man with deep smile lines around his eyes and his mouth, but his eyes were red-rimmed and angry, and his big meaty hands were clenched. There were a bunch of men sitting around in deck chairs near him that’d been drinking and playing cards and ignoring him for at least two out of the three hours Zack’d been wandering around, but they were looking now, and the looks weren’t friendly.

One of them caught his eye, and looking squarely at him, spat derisively on the sidewalk.

Zack knew about people taking their anger out on work and monsters. He’d just never been in the position of a Beach Plug when Ol’ Rick lost a hand at poker.

The first real _frisson_ of fear crept up his spine, unbidden. They were too big for one kid to handle all on his own. 

He flexed his fists, determined to go down swinging. It was just _unfair._ It was a _job,_ and one he hadn’t even gotten the uniform for yet _._ People around here should know something about needing work and gunning for it when they got the chance.

“Let me take care of it.” 

She stepped away from him for a moment and trotted up to the stationmaster. He couldn’t see her face but she burrowed into him, spreading her arms wide in a hug around his chest, as far around as she could reach.

He couldn’t hear what she stood up on tip-toe to tell him, but he saw when the man picked her up gently in his arms and started to cry. 

When she came back to him, took his hand, and started walking purposefully, he let her lead him. The two of them disappeared quickly down a maze of streets, stairs, and once across a few rooftops. 

The silence was solemn in acknowledgment of the man’s grief, but it didn’t stay that way. Zack was proud, but not too proud to be grateful, even to a little girl. “Thanks, doll. You saved my butt back there. I talk before I think sometimes.” 

Swaying over a rooftop jump, she turned back to smile at him. “You’re better than most Shinra goons. They don’t like talking to us down-city folk much.” 

“ _Goons?_ ”

“When they’re on a job, yeah. Straight face, stiff upper lip, no talking.” She mimed an automaton with her arms, “Step, step, step-two-step.”

Zack was not altogether pleased at the prospect of being muzzled on the job.

“I think some of them are just ashamed when they have to come down here, you know?” She took the jump, and danced impatiently from foot to foot, waiting for him. “Come on! We’ll be there soon!”

“Where’re we even going?”

“It’s my secret place,” she told him with a bright smile and a companionable glint in her eye, “you’ll be safe if you ever want to come back down and, you know, visit me.” 

He was a little disappointed when she led him to a side door of a ratty old broken-down church. Zack wasn’t exactly a fan of churches - his first memories of ‘em were of his legs being too short for the benches, and being smacked on the leg every time he kicked (and any small boy’ll tell you that you don’t _mean_ to kick, it just happens any ol’ time your tiny little legs want to if your mind starts to wander). 

Besides, while the priest in Gongaga had been a nice man, old and kindly, his words had never left too great an imprint on Zack’s soul. 

The inside of the church was cool though.

A lot of stuff was broken, like the floor and the windows and parts of the ceiling, plus the pews were dull and looked older than they probably were - as if someone’d taken the time to start scraping all the polish off, got lazy halfway, went out for lunch, and left it forever. 

But the holes in the ceiling weren’t all bad… somehow sunlight managed to filter down between the large pie slices of the Plate above, through those holes and through the broken stained glass windows; the largest sunbeams clustered directly into a patch of broken flooring. Zack didn’t need to be in SOLDIER yet to be able to be able to smell the tawny gold flowers that swayed nonchalantly in the soft puff of breeze from the eastern windows. 

Flopping down next to the patch, the girl fished a pair of dusty gardening gloves out from underneath the first pew, and cheerfully started weeding.

Well, it explained the dirty nose.

A little at a loss as to what to do, Zack set down his duffel next to the first pew, poked the bench gingerly to see whether or not it would actually support his weight, then sat, bracing his weight forward against his knees as he leaned in to check out the flowers. They didn’t look at all as if they belonged in Midgar.

For a few minutes, the girl said nothing and neither did he. It was quiet, peaceful in there - and while that wasn’t exactly what a kid from the country went looking for when he ups and moves out to the big city, the sounds of the cars and the machines and all the _people_ were muffled, and it just felt so much easier to _breathe_. 

Zack hadn’t thought there’d be much he’d be missing out of Gongaga, but the church and the sun made him just the teeny-tiniest bit homesick.

And then there was the… music. 

It was soft, so soft he hadn’t noticed it at first… less like it was in his ears, and more like it was playing in his head. It didn’t sound like instruments, none of the ones he’d ever heard anyway, and it wasn’t like Gongaga was so far out there that they didn’t get _radio_ or anything. 

But what was it? Now swelling, now dying down... it was a chorus, and it was music, but it didn’t sound like words, not any that he knew. He just got a feeling, and that feeling was _welcome_.

“Can you hear it too?”

The girl wasn’t smiling now, but her eyes had grown as big as golf balls, watching him with such hope rising… as if it was special, as if it was a secret. 

And it was funny when she did that, her hair shining in the sunlight because it looked like she could glow - her eyes were warm and so clear, like she could look right through you but that was okay, because what she saw was just fine. 

She was… pretty. 

Zack kinda wished that when he thanked her earlier, he’d offered her a kiss too.

“Yeah. What is it? It’s so… it’s really quiet. I don’t understand it.” 

Her eyebrows rose as she digested this, and if she was disappointed, her face didn’t show it. “They’re loud for me in here,” she told him, “like a big concert just for me in my head. I can ignore it if I try, but I don’t really want to much. They’re always with me. Always singing. They wait for me to join in, but I don’t know the words.”

Zack couldn’t decide whether or not this sounded like much fun. “Is there someone, some people, doing that? Can any of ‘em… hear you?”

Her words came slow, as if she were uncertain and distinctly uncomfortable talking about it, but she gamely tried to answer anyway because he’d asked. She wouldn’t look him in the eye though, her eyes tracking the dust motes dancing in the sunbeams. 

“I don’t know. Maybe? I think they try and tell me things sometimes. I always know when there’s danger. But… _you_ know. Sometimes they’re talking and singing and just _there_ … I can’t always understand. And it’s quieter outside, like a hum in my head, so unless I really shut everything else out and _listen…“_ she shrugged, going back to her gardening, “Maybe I’ll know more when I’m bigger.”

Zack laughed and inwardly thought _what a weirdo._

\--Not like it was a bad thing or anything. It was more like… maybe fortune-tellers were real, and maybe she was one. It was kinda new, and weird, and okay, a little cool. _If_ it was real. Maybe he was too credulous for his own good - top-Plate Midgar was probably gonna laugh itself silly over him - but… c'mon, it was those eyes, man. 

\--And maybe she could also read minds, because she turned pink at his laugh and her eyes went straight down to her toes. “Not funny.”

_So… so cute._

He also hadn’t meant to hurt her feelings. Not in the least. 

“Not at all,” he agreed, getting up to plop down next to her, leaning in penitently to nudge her with his shoulder, “Must get kinda crowded in there.”

She eyed him suspiciously, and shook a trowel at him, “I’m not crazy.”

“Probably a little crazy. You jumped in front of six goons to save me.”

“They weren’t _goons_.” 

“C’mon, they were pretty goonish goons. Mutated giants, desperate to squish innocent Shinra cadets to a pulp beneath their giant goon feet.”

“Coming from a Shinra goon!”

“Soon,” he promised, then grinned cheekily at her, hoping she didn’t whap him in the head with her trowel, “think you’ll still love me?”

Okay, so he’d wanted to make her blush again, and it worked - but she didn’t duck her head down this time, and there was an answering laugh in her green eyes, “What if I prefer blonds?”

There was a long, almost adult moment where they just looked at each other grinning like loons, letting that moment of perfect understanding linger... and then they were kids again as Zack mimed being shot through the heart. He collapsed theatrically backward into the dust clutching his chest as he groaned his eternal disappointment. 

“What’s your name anyway?” he asked her, much later, when they’d finished sketching out the bare rudiments of their respective histories.

That seemed to be the hardest question he’d asked all day because she hesitated for a long, long moment, and there was discomfort in her eyes. Then the moment passed, and she was all quicksilver and smiles again.

“Aeris,” she said. “Aeris Gainsborough.”

He made a face. Spelling was not his particular forté and hers was a triple-whammy. 

She poked him with the trowel, and he yelped. “You’d better learn it properly,” she informed him archly, her seriousness belied by her twinkling eyes, “how else are you going to write me when you’re locked inside Shinra?”

“Fire signals. If you see ‘help’ written on the side of the building, you come and you get me.”

“Come get you? And what would I get out of it?”

“When I get into SOLDIER, I’ll be your number one bodyguard. Anyone tries to bother you - giants, goons - I’ll handle ‘em. You wait and see.”

“And everyone will know your name, and quake in terror!”

“Exactly. They’ll think the Plate fell right on ‘em. Get ready, Midgar. Zack Fair is finally here!” He lay back in the dust, pillowing his head on his arms, and just watched the dust dance in the sunbeams. In here, it was easy to feel the excitement welling up all over again.

Aeris was quiet as she sat next to him. She was a thin little waif but warm against his side, and her voice was happy when she repeated his name. “Zack Fair. Nice to meet you, Zack. I’ll remember.” 

_\--Remember--_

There were those voices again. He craned his neck, eyes in the rafters as if he could pick out something hiding out in ‘em.

“Hey,” he said abruptly, sitting up. “These flowers. Are they all yours?”

“I… I guess so? Nobody else really comes in here, and I like taking care of them…”

“Can I buy one?”

She blinked at him, “Why don’t you just take it?” 

He laughed, jumping to his feet and holding out his hand to her, garden gloves and all. “Because they’re the first growing thing I’ve seen since I got into this city, and that’s worth something. How much?”

“...One gil.”

“Aw c’mon, you know they’ve got to be worth more than that. How often do people get out from under Plate just to crate these in down here?”

“One gil,” she repeated firmly, and ignoring his proffered hand to help her to her feet, she held out hers expectantly, waiting for the coin. 

It took some deep digging into his pockets to find a single gil, but her smile was bright when she took it and plucked one of the biggest, nicest-looking flowers in the patch for him in return.

“What are you going to do with it?” she asked curiously as she stuffed her garden tools snugly in a dented metal box beneath a pew. 

“Probably something really stupid,” he replied, giving her a hand up like a lady, and the cutest puppy dog eyes he was capable of, “you’ll save me if I’m in danger again, won’t you?”

Her eyebrows rose again, but there was something defiant in the set of her chin. “Of course!”

So defiant, in fact, that even at thirteen he knew he had to temper that kind of determination with some caution, for her sake. He wasn’t about to let his friends get hurt on his account.

“Just remember, you’re my top priority. This is gonna be my first real mission here in Midgar, and I don’t want anything happening to you.” He grinned, but the warning was real. “It'd ruin my reputation, get me?"

Her answering smile was sunny, even as her eyes did that _thing_ again, where they saw more than she let on. She knew the deal. Then her lip curled cheekily. “What reputation?”

Aww, now did she really have to make him say it? “The one I haven’t got yet.”

But he would. Soon. On this day, the sky was the limit.

As they snaked their way back to the train station, Zack was gratified to realize that he’d managed to memorize the way there - even down to a sneaky hairpin turn, partially hidden by a gigantic, precariously balanced pile of rusting truck parts. 

If he ever came by this way again, he was going to have to rig something up about those exposed edges. He didn’t care how skinny Aeris was, tetanus was no fun for anybody, and he was already dubious of the sort of medical that folks could afford down under Plate. An un-mastered Heal did not a doctor make. 

Holding his hand, she beamed up at him, bright as a star for a moment, as if she’d caught the edge of his thoughts, but she didn’t say anything more in acknowledgement. 

He was already learning though, and this time he refrained from asking, unsure if it had to do with… that other stuff, the singing, that she didn’t seem to have the right words to talk about. 

The train station was exactly the way they’d left it - and while the guys in the corner weren’t playing cards anymore, the stationmaster was still with them, sitting bent as an old man on another flimsy fold-out chair staring into the glowing embers of an ashtray as if into an open grave.

Aeris was quiet when he touched his hand to hers, silently telling her to stay as he took a deep breath and stepped up towards the group of surly-looking men. He didn’t dare look back at her, but she popped up in the corner of his eye anyway, her thin little face curious, warm, and strangely trusting.

Nice to have someone in his corner.

“Hello sir,” he heard himself saying, the words sticking in his throat like glue, but he pressed on, refusing to acknowledge his heart hammering in his throat. “My name’s Zack. I just got here from the country and my friend… she’s let me know just how tactless I’ve been to you. I want to apologize.”

One of the other men looked doubtful, muttering something under his breath that could have been “Shinra scum.”

Another one nudged him in the arm with an elbow, “He’s a _kid_.”

Zack didn’t care - or at least, he tried not to care. Time would take care of half the problem soon enough, and right now it was still being a kid he was banking on. The stationmaster hadn’t really looked up yet, but he’d cocked his head as if he was listening. That was better’n nothing. Just… did he have the words for this? 

He’d better. He meant to do well by this town now that he was here, and that wasn’t gonna happen just by hiding behind Shinra’s SOLDIER-proof walls.

“I know we can’t always help the company we keep - or work for, for that matter, and the only thing I can promise you is that, well,” he scrubbed a hand through the muss of his hair, very aware of how little he could offer, but gamely doing it anyway, “I’ll do my best, sir. What’s happened to you... it shouldn’t have. The enemy’s across the water, not here at home. I think Shinra needs to know that.” 

“Words are just wind.” The stationmaster spoke for the first time, turning his head to look him at him dead on with those red-rimmed eyes. “They don’t mean anything. And you’re nobody.” 

Zack palmed the flower he’d taken carefully from the church, cupping it in a large, callused palm. “Maybe for now,” he said quietly as he held it out to the man, a faintly perfumed promise, “but even General Sephiroth didn’t start out in SOLDIER, and that’s what I’m gunning for. You can make a lot of noise as a SOLDIER.”

The stationmaster didn’t say anything more, but when Zack slipped the flower into his hands, he didn’t just toss it aside. The men around him muttered some more, but the heat had gone out of their words a little, their curses merely perfunctory, and he walked away feeling a little bit lighter.

Nobody’d call it a perfect score, but he’d chalk that up as a win. Now he just had to live up to it. 

Aeris wasn’t quite smiling when he walked back over to her, but her hands were clasped in front of her, and her face was lit with a sort of internal glow, her enormous eyes luminous.

“You’re very brave,” she told him quietly, and then she did smile, a very little bit, as shy as he’d ever seen her. “I didn’t know what you were going to do.” 

Somehow it occurred to him that maybe this didn’t happen all that often. 

He grinned at her, “It was all you, doll. Best gil I ever spent.”

She opened her mouth as if to answer him, but two things happened at the same time: another train pulled in with a long whistle blast and a loud whine, and two Shinra transports pulled up to the station. 

As the back doors slid open with the hot hiss of hydraulics, Zack noted one of them was full of blue-clad Shinra uniforms who marched out with full kits, rifles in hand, while the other stood empty, probably waiting for the new recruits. 

Okay, Shinra had told him there'd be a _guide_ \- not a fully armed death squad!

The looks around the station were ugly, and the guns weren’t helping. But it didn’t look like Shinra was taking any chances.

Aeris slid in behind him, keeping as far out of direct line of sight as possible, “You’ll be okay now,” she told him, tugging on his arm with unashamed eagerness, “but if you have time to get away, you’ll come and visit me again? Come by the church again?”

He caught her up in a big bear hug with a soft huff of laughter. His first friend in this crazy new city, all his new life ahead of him, and she thought he was letting go of that? 

“Definitely! We’ve still got so much to explore, you and me.”

She was laughing again when he pulled away, like his was catching, “Only because you have such nice eyes. Blue like… like a scrap of sky.” 

“Yeah? Maybe it’s the light down here, they usually lean gray.”

“I don’t think they’re going to stay that way much longer, ” she murmured, almost to herself. If he didn’t have sharp ears already, he might even’ve missed it. 

He was going to ask, but like quicksilver, Aeris was Aeris again and she reached up all at once to slide her fingers through the wild spikes of his hair, petting it. “I wanted to do that when I saw you,” she admitted with a cheeky grin. “I thought they might be pokey.” 

If the sergeant hadn’t started bellowing in a voice like a brass gong, he’d have sat this confusing little bit of a girl down and interrogated her until she finally made sense.

As it was, all he could do was scrub a hand through his hair himself and shake his head in near-bewilderment as she started hustling him forward towards the huddle of new recruits. She even seemed to get over her crippling fear of soldier boys because she stuck around, waving at him until the door of the transport hissed shut between them. 

...He had to admit, it felt good for there to be someone to give him a proper send-off. For the first time since he’d hopped into the back of a truck in the dead of night on its way out from Gongaga, he thought about writing to his parents, just to tell ‘em he was okay.

He couldn’t help the grin that spread over his face as he felt the hot surge of hope rising in his chest again. 

Better than okay. He was going to be a SOLDIER.

*

It didn’t take long for Zack to realize it was a tough slog being a soldier - the regular kind, no caps lock required. 

Life in the Shinra barracks was hard - harder than he’d ever imagined, and it wasn’t like he’d come from sixteen years of easy living like some of the top-Platers in his unit. A lot of it boiled down to discipline - sure, Zack’s life in the country followed a measured rhythm governed by the rise and set of the sun, but growing up within those confines, it hadn’t exactly been very highly regimented.

Not like this. In Shinra, everything was a reason to put you down. Zack wasn’t sure if it was mandated (probably) or just an overall toxic environment (also likely) that made it feel like they worked you into the dirt just to watch you taste it. 

The abuse was incessant - everything was a staccato beat of forced double-time as their instructors tried to teach them how not to die, and Shinra muzzled just what those instructors were allowed to say.

He wasn’t just imagining things. The war against Wutai still raged hard on the other side of the sea, and with a single-minded, almost Berserk focus, Shinra threw money at every outlet that could possibly win them a war. That meant not scaring away the new recruits before they really knew what they’d gotten themselves into. 

Wutai. The last great nation that refused to submit to Shinra’s march of progress. It was more than the sum total of Wutain wealth, culture, and knowledge - it was the final stamp to ensure that no other country would ever doubt the necessity of the mako reactor again, nor the company that had made it a monopoly.

This kind of thinking wasn’t exactly balm for the average Midgarian soul, however. No, what they knew was deprivation (even the wealth of the top Plate couldn’t shield them entirely), and loss, and grief. Through those first bumbling years of the war they’d heard excuses, they’d watched and heard preachy, loudspeaker-type propaganda… and they’d watched the dead and dying come back in bits and pieces and usually not at all.

They were the first to be shipped off, newly trained, and who died by drove against exquisitely refined poisons, guerilla strikes in unfamiliar landscapes, and the finest of Wutain bladecraft. 

Undaunted, Shinra shipped out their finest weapon - the Masamune, sheathed in leather and steel and gleaming silver hair. 

...Yet it’d still taken years for the General to take the measure of his army and to shape it into the fighting force he needed. Impossibly young (sixteen!) for the job, the familiarity of command had come slowly in the face of so many older, more experienced leaders that found themselves so suddenly under the guiding hand of a boy. An untried, untested _boy_.

But through a combination of grudging respect and unsettled awe the General had the power to inspire, the Shinra army learned to trust him, just as they learned the land they now fought in. Under his steady and determined hand, following that undaunted prowess on the field right there with them, the war crept inexorably towards its conclusion. 

Even people back home began to hear the stories.

Lab specimen, certainly. But beautiful. Brilliant. Powerful. Ruthless. How had they managed to coalesce all those gifts into a petri dish?

Decades of research had gone into the making of him, Professor Hojo was wont to say (with an arrogant drawl and a way of looking down his nose at whomever was closest to him), years spent in the making of the perfect soldier. And one day Sephiroth would be more… so much more. 

(Hojo was not wont to elucidate just what he meant by the latter, and most merely assumed it was just professional hyperbole. It certainly netted him a sizeable chunk of the company budget every quarter.)

Whether or not he was, General Sephiroth had a reputation for being a rather scary son of a bitch. And yet, his soldiers learned to love him. They learned to follow him, unquestioningly - something about him had impressed even these men who were unafraid to die. So the families back home bided their time, and Midgar avoided full-blown riot, as its citizens waited to pass judgment on the actions of this mystery General. 

Even safely ensconced inside Shinra walls, Zack knew he should probably be thankful to the Boy General for keeping the peace, especially so far from home. He knew he should also be thankful to him for setting a precedent and the youngest ever enlistment age into the Shinra army in the history of the Planet (not to mention laxer grooming standards when it came to authorized hairstyles) otherwise he’d never’ve even been able to get his foot in the door.

Zack knew all these things. But Sephiroth was way off in some distant corner of Wutain making a name for himself. Making a _General_ of himself. And so peace, even an uneasy peace, was stifling when you were dying to get out and _do something._

Meanwhile, Zack was stuck slogging his way through the ranks. He logged more practice hours than anyone else. He took every leave he could get just to go on quick monster grinds (he’d even taken Aeris with him once or twice). But that wasn’t the same thing. He wanted _adventure_ , and there was still so much waiting to do. 

It wasn’t all a loss though. He even managed to learn a few things. 

No stranger to firearms in Gongaga, he now knew how to shoot and shoot proper, then break down his rifle at the end of the day to clean it. He could march all day, jog for hours, then make and break camp in less than fifteen minutes. He could saddle, mount, and ride even the trickiest of trainer birds, then handle tack, straw, and a good rub-down with no one’s help but his own.

He turned fourteen quietly in Midgar though he let everyone else go on thinking he was sixteen - made easier since he was already shooting up taller every day (though still not as tall as he’d like), his shoulders broader, his muscles heavier, all of it giving weight to the lie. 

He was charming, fearless, and utterly undaunted by any challenge he ever met. 

And he made it.

In less than seven months (excruciatingly slow to experience, but a speed that set his head reeling when he looked back at it), Zack skyrocketed from Shinra recruit to SOLDIER Third Class.

Much of it was thanks to his exceptional skill with a sword (he acquitted himself well with the rifle although perhaps not spectacularly) and can’t-keep-me-down demeanor that charmed a not-insignificant number of NCOs (though they'd never admit it to his face even on pain of death). 

But mostly it was thanks to an extraordinary compatibility with the initial mako injections that vaulted him so quickly into Third. While the whole world swam, haloed in a faint glow of refracted green and every sense he had hammered at his his brain twice as hard, twice as fast for over an hour, his body absorbed the stuff like water in a desert and begged for more. 

He was a shoo-in. And while no army liked any of their assets to get a swelled head over the fact, Zack Fair was quietly shortlisted for the up-and-up. They _needed_ more SOLDIERs, and if this kid had the rocks to make it as a Third, he’d make Second within the year barring anything… unfortunate. 

Because SOLDIER was Sephiroth’s jurisdiction, and finally, _finally,_ Zack was heading to the front.

...

It was just… 

Something had changed while he had been bunkered down in Shinra. Maybe he'd just seen a little too much of it.

Sure, he’d had no outside contact for a solid month and a half during basic, but the company was better about letting its boys out into the city or back home for short, day- or week-long visits in the months that followed. They were going to war after all, and Shinra knew, even as the soldiers never really realized, that a very significant number of them weren’t coming back.

But Zack didn't even need that freedom to see what Shinra didn't want to say. Even young, even as open and honest and optimistic as he was, he wasn’t _stupid_ , and he saw a lot more than he let on. There was a cold callousness to Shinra that went beyond militant formality. The close marriage of the military to the corporate face of the company was tightest in Midgar, and there was no way to ignore how big the social gap was that lay between the two.

Shinra executives looked down at you and sneered at you for getting yourself into this - even the guys in the middle with their wrinkled suit jackets and rabbity faces or the dolled-up girls behind the desks - like they were somehow better than you if you walked by in blue. 

He tried not to care. Making Third Class was nothing to scoff at. 

Problem was, by that time Shinra was getting desperate and snapped up everyone that came close to fitting the bill. You saw a lot of promotions during those last few years of the war, and a lot of refined mako injections being handed out wholesale. Hojo was in his element.

Not, as Zack understood it, that the Professor was entirely too happy about this particular fact. A born elitist and geniocrat, Professor Hojo insisted that his experiments were meant to be on only the best, the _finest_ specimens the Planet had to offer. He didn’t take well to the relaxing of those standards, but President Shinra’s greed -- sorry, “ _ambition_ ” -- proved to be more than a match for all of Hojo’s officious jawing. So long as no one ended up with their brains leaking out of their ears (in _public_ anyway), they were in the business of making money out of mako, and that included the shots. 

As for the older Third Class SOLDIERs, the more experienced ones who lived and got to come back on leave that he’d hoped to glean some good advice from, well, there was no support from that corner either. They were angry, bitter, and they looked down on him too, because _you know, if it hadn’t been for the war…_

He tried not to let that get to him either. Zack was going to prove 'em wrong.

*

When he made it into the church, Aeris was already there waiting for him. No gardening gloves for her today, she was sitting cross-legged on one of the stone steps, staring meditatively at her flowers. 

The face that she lifted up to his looked younger than usual, pinched with worry. She was in white that day with her big, brown, omnipresent boots, and her skirts rustled against her legs as she stood up to walk to him, her hands held out.

He tried an approximation of his usual grin, and came up short as the film of mako green sharpened around her features, forcing it into unnaturally bright contrast. He felt like he’d had night-vision goggles strapped to his head, and then gotten chucked underwater.

“Zack?” she asked, her voice low with concern - which he appreciated, because his ears were still ringing from the cacophony of sound from outside. If some Second with a knowing smile hadn’t offered to drop him off while on his way to the Honeybee, he’d never even have made it out of the rec room. 

“Ohhh…” she murmured in understanding when she looked fully into his face. “Oh, Zack…”

He’d seen how he looked in the mirror, even with the lights dimmed as low as he could, and the world swimming in a faint wash of green. His eyes gleamed with the faint new glow of mako light: a filmy blue that washed over the gray in his eyes and made them shimmer ever so slightly with an unnatural gleam. People shied away from him now when they saw him in the half-light, and he knew it wasn’t just the new uniform.

“Hey, gorgeous,” he replied, and was a little embarrassed at just how weak and reedy his voice sounded. This wasn’t exactly how he imagined parading into the church just to, you know, impress a girl.

He hoped he wasn’t going to vomit all over her shoes.

“This visit might, _might_ call for a take two,” he warned her sheepishly, as he scrubbed the heels of his hands against his eyes. “They warned me I might not wanna leave Shinra property for like a week yet, but…”

“...you missed me?”

That did make him smile, and the effort didn’t hurt as much as it had. “I always miss you, doll.” 

“And you knew I brought sandwiches.” 

He felt her hand on his arm, tugging him thoughtfully to a set of pews off to the side, considerately further from the flowers than was their usual wont - he didn’t think he could stand the too-strong scent of a dozen different perfumes so close right now. 

“I… did hope you would bring sandwiches.” 

He had. Both Aeris and her mother got along very well with the Wall Market vendors, and the availability of good honey-cured ham was never an issue for them as it was for anybody in scarlet or blue. Besides, there was nothing like her homegrown vegetables, on or off the Plate, in his not-unbiased country boy opinion. 

She shook a thermos at him, “And freshly squeezed orange juice. There was a new shipment from Kalm this morning.”

“You caught me. I came because you are a pint-sized goddess of plenty, and I am a slave to my stomach.” 

“ _Pint-sized!_ ”

“Goddess!” he reminded her with a yelp as she grabbed his ear and pinched it in mock indignance.

“And to think,” she continued, wedging a small picnic basket up onto the pew between them and starting to unpack it (largely into his lap and into his hands), “I even went through the trouble of baking you dessert.” 

“I am your humble servant,” he replied obediently at the first whiff of warm fruit sugar and cinnamon wafted up from its wicker depths, “I sing only hymns of praise and worship.”

It was just… he hoped he could actually eat everything. Or anything. Even at thirteen, Aeris had a highly-developed sense of what would bring his inimitable taste buds to begging, salivating heel, but after three rounds of mako injections and several hours of soaking in a mako tube, he hadn’t been able to keep much down for over two days straight. 

And while he didn’t _normally_ get seasick, the prospect of getting crammed onto a cargo ship within a few short weeks just didn’t lend much spice to life.

He stiffened suddenly as hands closed over his eyes from behind, and only the knowledge that it was Aeris’s particular mix of soap, flowers, and earth kept him from instinctively grabbing her wrists and sharply twisting. 

“You’re so preoccupied,” she murmured, drawing his head back so that the soft spikes of his hair were squished against her belly and her voice sounded faint and far away. “I don’t… I don’t really know how to do this, but…”

She smelled… green? It was different from the sharp smell of mako that still overlaid everything - it was deeper, almost astringent, clean.

“What are you doing…?” 

Though her hands tightened over his eyes, not hard, but firm, her voice was preoccupied. “Just… taking a look.”

He stilled instantly.

“...Using a staple gun to thread a needle,” she said at last, a faint current of disapproval in her voice under the relief, “I don’t think Shinra has really perfected the art of _balance_ , have they?”

“When every problem’s a nail…”

“And time is of the essence, I guess.” She sighed. “It’s the mako, of course. It feels… different. Not even so much like Lifestream anymore, but something else. Something…” She shivered and didn’t finish the sentence. “So much over so little time… it’s not easy, is it? How are the others that had to do this?”

“Not many of them out of bed yet.”

“And you came all this way…” 

He heard the smile in her voice. “The healing power of ham and cheese sandwiches, doll.”

“Oh, sandwiches won’t fix this - not yet, anyway - but… maybe… _this_ …”

By now Zack knew what it felt like for a Cure to be used on him - the cloud of green, the backwash of power, the sudden strangeness as wounds closed in an instant - and this… wasn’t that. 

This was slow. A small, tiny glow that began at the very core of his chest, and radiated outwards with a cool, gentle touch. It wasn’t flashy like a Cure, and it held back like it was asking, but it seeped through his body like water through the cracks in the earth, and it just… felt… _better_. 

His senses sharpened - the pounding headache receded, and as the hazy wash of mako green finally started to fade, he felt a rising joy at the very richness of the color around him, the intoxicating complexity of scent.

It wasn’t overpowering now, it was… it was good.

And he felt so very _strong_.

When Aeris finally pulled her hands away and stepped back, he reached up to catch them, his hands closing around her tiny wrists, a gentle smile spreading across his face.

“You are amazing,” he told her, and he meant it, still feeling the soft glow of her inside as he turned up her hands up in his and pressed a kiss into her palms.

It was all her doing that he could feel the spike in her pulse against his lips, but it didn’t take SOLDIER senses to know that even if he couldn’t see it, there was a blush staining her cheeks again.

She pulled away, flustered, with a bubble of breathless laughter. “You would have sulked too much if you couldn’t finish your sandwich.”

“Cried,” he corrected her, “wept and torn my hair in mourning, point of fact.” He leapt to his feet, clearing the back of the pew in front with ease, and balanced on the uneven wood with better reflexes than he’d ever imagined, having stumbled into walls, door edges, and his own two feet like a town drunk for over two days straight. 

He felt like he could do _anything_.

He turned to look at her, his eyes shining, and this time it wasn’t just the mako. “You are a worker of miracles, doll. If my unit just had someone like you…”

“No!”

Zack froze at the shrill squawk of urgency in her voice, the sudden whiteness of her face. He… he’d known she wasn’t really comfortable about talking about… whatever that was… but…

“You can’t tell them,” she continued, clasping her hands in front of her again, but they were tight now, her knuckles turning white, “you can’t tell _anybody_ about… about any of that. Especially not in Shinra.”

He jumped, clearing the pews and landing in the dust next to her, reached out to hold her hand. “Hey… hey. I didn’t mean… Aeris, you’re not in any _danger_ are you?”

Because the sneaking realization had occurred to him that if she could do this, if she could fix him, and so quickly, there was every good reason to believe that she could do the same for others. And if anyone in Shinra knew she could fix up their SOLDIERs like _that_ …

His hands tightened on hers, “They’re not gonna know,” he told her, dropping to one knee. “Not from me. Honor-sworn, I mean it.” 

Her fingers relaxed under his and she even managed a smile, “That's so old-fashioned.”

“Hey, we treat these things serious in Gongaga. Don’t let my pretty face fool you, I’m a gentleman, through and through.” He grinned. “But you gotta say it.”

“Witnessed.”

“Good girl.” He was back on his feet in an instant, and his arms were around her. Her head fit so neatly against his neck when he hugged her. “It’s our secret.”

He was a SOLDIER now. There had to be something he could do to keep her safe.

*

Four days after that, Zack found himself getting packed onto a transport headed out to Junon. 

Those four days had started with the utter shock on Second Class Kerner’s face when he went back for Zack in Sector 6 and found Zack standing and waiting alert as a high-crested chocobo, looking well-rested and ready for bear.

Four days of poking, prodding, and highly-invasive questioning later, his recovery from the mako treatments were again attributed to his spectacular affinity to the stuff, and another checkmark was privately added to his profile. 

He never mentioned Aeris. Even when he was brought in for a private interview with an unsmiling ramrod of a man named Tseng from the Department of Administrative Research who hinted broadly about a young girl from the slums with special… talents… he lied with the bland, innocent face of a baby.

He thought he saw the faint hint of an approving smile lurking in the corners of Tseng’s mouth when they finished, but he got nothing but a curt nod in acknowledgment as he was dismissed.

The orders for Zack Fair to ship out ahead of his unit arrived the very next day.

*

_Seven months to make a SOLDIER._

Zack couldn’t help but muse over this fact as he sat swaying in the back of a transport, his forearms braced against his knees, hemmed in by a small crowd of faces he knew by acquaintance if perhaps not by name.

He didn’t want to admit it to anybody, least of all these people he barely knew, that now that it was coming, but not soon enough that he could feel the adrenaline pumping, he was pretty damned fucking scared. 

_At what price, machismo?_ he thought dryly to himself. 

For the first time in a long time, he felt _young_. Fourteen didn’t always sit so heavily on him, but it did today when he finally thought, if perhaps briefly, of what it’d be like to die. 

_Well_ , he thought, as he boarded the ship off of Junon and the rumble of machinery eclipsed even the roar of the storm outside, _if I’m gonna die, then gods will it, at least let it be an adventure._

At fourteen, that’s all he knew to ask for, really.

He just wished he’d gotten the chance to send his mom a letter before he headed off to Wutai. Sure, there’d probably be a chance to get some correspondence written and sent, but mails could be uncertain over there, and Zack didn’t relish the thought of Shinra going through his private letters, even for practical censoring purposes.

For all they knew, he was partying himself silly back in Midgar over his recent promotion (he’d finally told them that he’d signed up for the army, and thus far, nobody from Gongaga had tried to storm the main corporate lobby with his birth certificate to give him away). They certainly weren't gonna imagine him here, sitting in a cargo hold where the smell of some kid’s vomit clung to his nostrils and made the contents of his stomach roil treacherously in response.

\--The Last Donut had probably been a bad idea, in hindsight. So too the Last Gallon of Soda, The Last Sack of Bulk Store Candy, and The Last Extra-Large Caramel Popcorn. 

At least he’d gotten to say goodbye to Aeris before he left.

He’d hoped for a little more time - so that he could thank her properly for what she’d done for him, so that he could reassure her that she hadn’t taken a chance on him for no reason, and that he really wished she could be his girlfrahhjsdkfjl… _um_. 

\--Yeah, okay, so maybe not that last one. It’d probably be too soon, and too far out there, and really it was no fair asking someone something like that if you were going off to pursue a career with a painfully high casualty rate. 

But, as before, it was like she’d known. She'd gone to find him instead. 

*

The day he got his orders, it’d been an absolute flurry of activity. 

The packing was one thing; his gear was standardized and while he was decidedly _not_ a tidy person, his personal items hadn’t exactly had much time to really pile up. It was the other stuff - signing off the other necessary equipment: materia, weapons, a few forms intended for use if ever he was called upon to go mounted… 

That was SOLDIER for you, everything needed to be documented, and then signed in triplicate. Shinra liked keeping track of their expensive toys, even if they didn’t mind them getting broken in the process.

It’d taken until evening before he could wrangle a few hours’ leave and make a dash for one of the outbound trains. He hadn’t really been able to think it out too straight - whether or not he’d be able to make it down groundside and back before curfew. 

She’d met him at the topside train station, and he’d caught sight of her even as he’d frantically raked his eyes over the train departure board, her strange little half-smile evident on her small features, and her eyes unfocused and almost dreamy. Her hair was hidden underneath a large hood, and she was wearing a long dark dress that only the tips of her boots peeped out from under. 

She didn’t _look_ like Aeris - and that was precisely the point. He went to her, slowing his pace into something nonchalant and casual, and followed at a discreet distance when she veered away through the crowds without a word.

She didn’t need words to understand him, not really. And he… well, he was learning. 

“You’re going away tomorrow, aren’t you?” she asked him at last, after they finally stopped in a shady corner of a public garden. He’d never seen a statue of the President look so benevolent as this one did, peering over Aeris’s shoulder as she sat down in front of it, long skirts settling in a pool around her… and her eyelids flickering restlessly as she kept a keen watch around them.

“You didn’t have to take this big of a risk just to come up here, you know,” he took her hand as he sat down next to her, playing the ball of his thumb over her fingers like a touchstone. She seemed to take some measure of calm from even just that. “I’d have made it down to say goodbye.”

Although he was grateful she’d got it into her head to try. Shinra got antsy when they invested into a SOLDIER’s upkeep, and would not be pleased to think he’d run off the night before he needed to ship out. It was a never-ceasing fount of amazement how she could just _know_ stuff, sometimes at random, sometimes about important things. The more he learned, the less and less it felt like he understood. 

She smiled, tentatively, “Maybe it’s better not to rush?”

He grinned and nudged her with his knee. “For you? All the time in the world, doll.”

Her smile widened in appreciation, even as her eyes acknowledged the lie.

“So, any advice you’ve got to give to a rookie shipping out? Ninja tactics, promotion-worthy strategies?”

He didn’t usually… and if he ever did it was not _seriously_ … but he was leaving and-- well, it’d be handy to know whether or not he was gonna die.

She cocked her head at him, her flickering eyes steady at last on the glowing blue of his. She reached out to play with the spikes of his hair again, carding through the wild tangle like it was puppy fur. “Be safe,” she said at last with a rueful shake of her head, “Be safe and come home.” 

So the voices didn’t have any answers either.

He wrapped an arm around her thin shoulders, and she leaned her head in against his neck. He could see the dark lace of her eyelashes flutter shut, trusting at least for a short while that if anyone would make a better lookout, it was a SOLDIER.

Zack fell a little more in love right then and there. He’d probably even have said something, and that something would probably would’ve been really stupid and possibly tongue-tied, if Aeris hadn’t pulled away from him with a puzzled look on her face.

“What is it?” he asked, when the curious expression didn’t leave her face, and she cocked her head as she just looked at him, all eyes, like a chocobo sizing up a saddle for the first time. 

“You know I get these… feelings about things, and sometimes I can… and with you, I _know_ that you… and then I feel like…”

Zack was pretty sure watching her babble and flail her hands and turn red as a tomato should not as charming and downright _cute_ as it was. Man, he had it bad.

“--and I’m so bad at this, but I want you to _understand_ like I can--”

Would she smack him if he kissed her right now? 

“--oh this is useless!”

He nodded, still perplexed, but charmed. “Maybe one step at a time would be better. Full complete sentences. I know you got it in you.”

She did smack him. But she also kept trying, her face turning a few shades redder, “If you… if you met…” 

Godsall take him, was she _jealous?_

“You… you know there’s no one else like you, right?”

There. That was meaningful without being over-eager, right?

She opened her mouth. Closed it. He felt his heart hammer hard in his chest for a sudden, brief instant before her smile came back, soft and glowing. “There’s no one else like you either, Zack. That’s… that’s what I’m trying to say. I think… you’re going to meet someone soon. Someone who’s going to need you really, really badly.”

“Okay…”

…

He was gonna be honest, that _sounded_ just plain weird. Was she giving him the brush off?

With a frustrated sound, she threw her arms around him, crushing him in the biggest hug ever, burrowing her face into his neck.

His arms closed tenderly around her. How could he not? His heart sped up and his stomach did backflips whenever she was around. Aeris always looked delicate enough to break - and yet she was resourceful and gutsy and stronger in so many ways than he could ever really know.

“You are the best boy in the world,” she whispered against his skin, her breath driving a thrilling shiver up the line of his neck when she didn’t let go. “You _are_. I’m going to miss you so, _so much_. And I’m going to write you while you’re gone, and I’m going to wait for you to come back, but Zack… I have this really bad feeling that it’s _important_. You could… you can _save_ him.”

Um.

...Him?

*

The first thing he learned about Wutai was the _heat_. Sure, they'd taught him something about what to expect, but Shinra had been specifically hazy about the exact details, particularly for new recruits. Zack knew heat - the underbelly of Midgar was wrapped in a thick mass of it, the Plate trapping all the heat of the reactors above and the industrial sectors below all day and only began petering off in the dark hours when the sun set. 

He also knew a little bit about jungle - Gongaga was a small village but it straddled that peculiar area that ceded jungle flora into wide grassland. It sat in the foothills of a mountain, though, at the juncture between two deep lines of Lifestream, and so maybe that was what could make all the difference. 

The heat here felt alive - a wet, almost touchable thing that hit the back of his throat like something that needed to be swallowed, not breathed. 

The only saving grace was the brisk breeze that being so near the water whipped up at this time of the day... although Zack knew immediately that that wouldn't last. And it would be no help once he actually had to trek out into the jungle itself - a dark looming smudge in the distance within a minute's walk from the tall walls of the compound.

But that wasn’t his only problem.

The troops marched off the ship as one, however individual units peeled off and fanned out like a well-oiled machine... and that left Zack a little in the lurch because his unit wasn't due to ship in for at least another month. 

Undaunted, he approached the first guy he saw in SOLDIER reds.

...It was the first, but not the last time he would get caught out on the top of someone's shit list just for being who he was. 

"Oh you're the Professor's latest _princess_. Yeah, I've heard of you. Bit early, aren't you?"

The shadows had already lengthened and the sun was on the cusp of setting, but Zack was pretty certain the guy wasn't talking about the time of day. "I just go where they throw me. Sir."

"All that money shot into your veins and Shinra couldn't even train that smart mouth outta you. A damn waste."

It wasn't always hard for Zack to keep his temper... but he was pretty sure a side-effect of the mako injections was a heightened level of aggression and a highly-developed instinct to sock dickwads in the face. What a shame.

It was a good thing that one thing Shinra _had_ managed to drum into him was the utterly impassive, unperturbed mien that was invaluable in the face of shouting sergeants. Turns out, it also worked while playing strip poker and facing off stick-up-his-ass Seconds. Lucky him.

"--any case, there's nowhere good enough to stick you yet. The Engineering Corps is still setting up the permanent buildings right under our feet in the new compound. We've got units tented up all over the damn place--"

He stopped suddenly, and Zack... was not reassured by the Second's broad smile, or the quick conference he had with two more SOLDIERs in Shinra crimson before he came back into earshot. 

"Yeah. Sorry, kid. Looks like we don’t got a place for you here. You head on over to B42 - plenty of guest tent over there for your ladyship. You won't get your orders until the morning anyway."

The compound _was_ still in the process of getting properly built. There were a number of military tents elbow-to-elbow with steel latticework and half-raised walls in concrete. Zack would learn - and see later - that this was only the latest in a string of Shinra bases set up on their side of Wutain territory. 

He would also learn that the completed and highly-fortified central buildings were mostly restricted offices, several others were warehouses waiting for shipments of supplies and ordnance, and that nobody working in them were very good at giving a detailed route to where he needed to go. 

By the time he found where B42 was (another small forest of canvas tents neatly arranged in rows with military precision), he was ready to bunk down and lay out his bedroll on a crateful of rifles if he really had to. 

This time another Second directed him to an actual tent and he stumbled through with the first sense of gratitude he'd felt all day. 

\--Then he'd nearly stepped on a spill of silver hair, and felt the touch of cold steel kiss his throat. That feeling went away right quick.

Because how was Zack supposed to know that it was a matter of national security that General Sephiroth's whereabouts were kept under lock and key - and yet could still change on a dime? The Seconds though - they were posted on missions all over the complex, every one of them with a PHS and an ear to the ground.

Bastards.

It would forever after be a private point of shame that the only sound he could think of to say to those eyes glowing in the near-dark was a short “ _Gluck!_ ”

Very suave. Very manly. Just the thing to say to the single most beautiful man Zack had ever laid eyes on. 

They didn’t send many pictures back to Midgar of Shinra’s Boy General - people thought it was odd enough that the largest standing army on the Planet was following someone who was still edging out of puberty without needing to stare him in the face. Still… with that hair and those eyes… who else could it possibly be?

General Sephiroth, in the flesh. Half-naked and coiled as though ready to spring. 

\-- _Fuck_ he was pretty. Zack really hadn’t been expecting that.

He saw the eyes flicker to his uniform and to the dog tags hanging off his neck, and felt the faint pressure of steel leave his skin, though he didn’t remove it completely just yet.

“May I help you?” the man - youth, really - finally asked quietly, in a voice shockingly deep for so delicate-looking a face.

Zack the Infallible Linguist replied, “Er… I was told… that is…”

Mhm. _Impressive_.

He took a deep breath. “I think I might have made a mistake. I was sent ahead of my unit and I don’t have any new orders. I was-- I thought this was my tent, sir.” 

“Papers?”

With infinite care, Zack fished them out one-handed from a zippered side pocket in his duffel and handed them over.

The knife (he could see now that it was a knife and not the flagpole of a sword Sephiroth was reputed to use) never wavered in that iron grip as the General turned his eyes to scan them briskly, his eyes seeing as clearly in the dim half-light as if it’d been broad daylight. 

When he handed them back and lowered the knife, Zack thought he saw a faint curiosity in the very depths of those slit-pupiled eyes even though the rest of his face remained utterly impassive.

“I’ve heard of you. ‘Unusual mako affinities’... and I understand a rather impressive recovery.”

“Yes, sir.”

Zack didn’t say it, but it came as a definite surprise to see one of the higher-ups capable of pinning a face, a name, and a history together so quickly… much less at all.

“I trust the Professor was pleased with you?”

There was no doubt in his mind that Sephiroth was referring to Hojo. Zack had only ever seen the man in passing once or twice, but the assessing look he gave behind the giant spectacles was unsettling - a glimpse inside a high-functioning sociopath.

“I’ve never met the man, sir. Dr. MacKinlay oversaw my treatments.” 

Something in the General’s face relaxed minutely. “A good man. A little lacking in imagination, perhaps, but honorable.”

“If you’ll pardon me for saying it, sir, I can’t say I’m unhappy about a little less scientific enthusiasm on his part.”

An eyebrow quirked, but Sephiroth never even cracked a smile. “I don’t fault you for that.” 

There was a brief moment of silence as the General looked at him thoughtfully, then cocked his head and peered out through the open tent flaps and the hazy web of the mosquito netting. Zack didn’t need to be a First to be able to hear the snickers and the guffawing - and he had a pretty good idea that it was at his own expense. 

Well, fuck ‘em. He set his teeth and kept his silence. He wouldn’t give them the satisfaction.

“Come in,” Sephiroth said abruptly, moving aside. “You will stay here tonight.”

“I--” It was on the tip of his tongue to ask if the General was _sure_ … but Zack had already gotten the impression that the General wouldn’t say anything if he wasn’t. “Yes, sir.”

With precise, Spartan movements, the General snapped the switch on the lights - tubes of them strapped up along the center pole - and began clearing several stacks of papers and a datapad or two prudently out of Zack’s sight. 

The Seconds had gotten one thing right - there _was_ plenty of room for Zack’s prissy princess self, and more to boot. This tent was obviously rigged for more permanent use - too small for cots, Sephiroth had already claimed the space closest to the exit for his bedroll, but there was ample space for Zack’s things, a fold-out desk with a number of stacked folders (probably not as sensitive as the stuff Sephiroth had already stowed away, but Zack’d bet a few hundred gil that they were still way over his clearance level), and a number of stacked cases against one canvas wall. 

There was also a chair with a dark leather coat slung over the back, and a sheathed sword lying next to the General’s bedroll that measured the full width of the available tent space. 

Of course, Zack’s Buster took up no small amount of room when he unhooked it from his back and laid it out too. With the smooth motions of drilled-in repetition, Zack set to unpacking. It was awkward, but not as bad as he’d thought it might be, to do all of it under Sephiroth’s watchful eye. 

“Do you know who I am?”

Zack’s hands stilled and he looked up just to check whether or not the General was serious because it sounded… well, most people who asked were just being pompous. This sounded genuine.

If there was one thing he had not been prepared to learn about Shinra personnel in power, it was that they were capable of real humility.

“You’re the General, sir. General Sephiroth.”

“I am. I do not take direct command of Thirds myself as a general rule, but I do often assess them for promotion to the upper classes. You would have come to me eventually, I think.”

The General’s voice was inflectionless, unaccented… on the emotive scale, he might as well be a loudspeaker. Except that voice was also deep and rich as velvet, and Zack thought it just might well be wasted anywhere outside of a courtroom. ‘Cause man, if the General ever turned that voice on a jury and told them to jump… 

\--Heck, _he’d_ fall over himself making sure he knew how high.

“I hope so, sir. I hope you won't take it the wrong way if I tell you I don’t want to stay in Third Class forever.”

Sephiroth’s eyebrow rose, and he settled himself in a cross-legged position, his body and his face as serene as a yogi... but there was an intensity in his eyes that outed as curiosity. 

“As I understand it, you haven’t worn the blues for very long.”

Zack scrubbed a hand through his hair, “Yes, sir. It’s a new promotion. But you said it yourself… Thirds don’t get to work for you. And I’d… I’d really like to.”

That sounded a lot lamer the second it came out of his mouth, but it didn’t change the fact that he meant every word of it in earnest.

“Even now? I can see your welcome hasn’t been everything a greenie might desire. And I know Midgar paints a somewhat skewed image of their Demon General to the public.”

Zack smiled. "If you really do breathe fire, sir, I'd like to see it for myself."

And… while that wasn’t exactly the most flattering reply, Sephiroth’s face never lost that patient, faintly curious expression. 

It wasn't until much, much later when Zack knew the General better that he realized maybe that might have been the first time anyone had ever spoken to Sephiroth like that - candidly, easily... a friend if only he wanted one.

At the time, he only found it encouraging that the General didn't rip into him for impudence. It was a new thing, finding a superior that got his message across without the peculiar, admittedly confidence-inspiring mix of profanity and personal insult spoken so fluently by Shinra sergeants. 

“Do you know why I asked you to stay?” Sephiroth asked him after a moment’s pause as if blithely unaware of the abrupt change in pace.

“No, sir.” 

“I recognize when my soldiers are trying to play a trick on someone. Most of my Seconds, a small percentage of the Firsts, and perhaps a handful of the Thirds… in one fell swoop I have seen you alienate an entire third of my fighting force for the simple reason that you are better than you are supposed to be.”

 _That many?_ Gods help him, maybe he should start sleeping with a knife too.

“I can’t take credit for that, sir. I’ve done my best not to make it a big deal... I can’t help the way I’m made.”

Even with the General, Zack was loathe to discuss anything about Aeris. They still had phones here in Wutai, and Aeris wasn’t getting locked up just because he got himself a big mouth now.

\--And maybe… okay, maybe some of it was also because it was really… cool… for someone like Sephiroth to take an interest, even if it might be a little off the mark.

“That is so. It has gotten you this far, but what happens now will be a testament to yourself, not the Professor. I’m curious to see how you will do.” 

Zack didn’t know how to answer that - his first instinct was to salute. He suppressed it by main force of will however, sensing it’d just be out-and-out silly in any situation where a greenie and the very top brass were sitting together in a tent having a powwow. If your superior was okay with letting propriety slide, even for a little while, you didn’t just up and remind him of it yourself before he was ready, right?

“I’ll do my best, sir.”

It sounded so plain-spoken coming out of his mouth… but Zack had never been about the words, it was the intent that really mattered. And he meant them - whatever the General had to throw at him, he’d do it… or die trying. 

Maybe Sephiroth was just a really quick study, because when he nodded silently, Zack got the impression that he really got it - the words he’d said and the ones he hadn’t.

“Perhaps you should sleep now,” Sephiroth said, as abruptly as ever, “I will decide what to do with you while you are here and your unit is not. You will need your rest.”

Zack tried very, very hard just to listen and obey… but he couldn’t suppress the smile that lit the corners of his face. Maybe it was presumptuous of him, but Sephiroth spoke like someone used to maintaining barriers not because they made him feel safer, but because he felt he ought to. There was an intensity in those cat eyes that spoke to Zack, that said maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad idea to push just a little bit. 

“Is that an order, sir?”

“...It is not.”

Zack sat down on his bedroll, “Tell me if I overstep, sir. But if it’s alright with you, it’s my first night out here and I expected to be sharing a tent with four other sweaty guys just antsing to give me bad advice. Can you do me any better?"

Oh. Well. That was... Okay, so there was pushing and then there was shameless liberty. He hadn't exactly meant to talk like… You weren't allowed to... You just couldn't _do_ \--

"Do not let anyone borrow your socks."

Zack blinked. Right, so he hadn’t exactly expected to get away with that.

Sephiroth wasn't smiling, but he wasn't angry either. In fact, Zack would daresay the General looked downright curious, as if he'd just finished poking a strange new animal and was sitting back to watch what it would do. 

Zack felt rather like a tiger's first hedgehog… and that it wasn’t such a bad thing to be as you might think.

"Why’s that, sir?"

"This is Wutai. It is hot and it is wet and your clothes will rot right off your back if you let them. The vegetation is thick here, when the fogs set in it is difficult for the regular troops to see further than five feet ahead - and in some light, SOLDIERs do no better. The terrain is treacherous - there will be swamps, leeches, dozens of poisonous snakes. It is nearly impossible to discern civilian from undercover enemy… they are often both. Keep your feet as dry as you can, and Cure any open wounds as quickly as possible before infection sets in.”

The General sounded like a textbook, but that didn’t matter to Zack who listened like a man entranced. 

\--It was that voice again… so concise and inflectionless, but in such a rich, cultured timbre Zack was almost certain he'd take any order if spoken to like that... and with pleasure. 

_...Whoa_. 

"Socks," he repeated stupidly, fighting the heat that was rising to his face. This was... this was new. Godsall take him, was he actually flustered?

\--Was he _blushing?_

He didn’t exactly have decades of experience to draw from, but the only person on the Planet who had the uncanny knack of doing that on a regular basis was pretty much a psychic. And maybe the love of his life. What did that make the General?

“Socks," Sephiroth confirmed, and Zack thought he almost saw the faintest hint of a smile at last. "You will find out soon that the majority of the Shinra army takes what pleasures they may - and I have it on the best authority that dry feet are quite the commodity in this jungle.”

“You’ve sold me, sir,” Zack said at last, unsure for the first time whether or not the General was actually laughing at him behind that impassive mask, “I will be a stingy as a _swartalf_. No man will know the generosity of my sock drawer while I’m on watch.”

Sephiroth regarded him for a moment. “How old are you?”

That caught Zack off-guard. He hadn’t… had he given himself away?

“Sixteen, sir.”

Those eerily glowing eyes - SOLDIER eyes on _crack_ \- regarded him soberly for a long moment. Zack found himself honestly frightened that Sephiroth really did have Aeris-level mind-reading powers. 

"Indeed?" Sephiroth's voice might have been inflectionless before, but now that one word came out flat. 

Zack didn't get it. He could lie as well as the best of them… and he'd faced down the Turks, hadn't he? So what was it about this one man's silent composure that made his conscience run laps underneath his skin? 

Zack took the jump. "No, sir."

It... didn't look like Sephiroth's expression had changed one iota, but Zack felt curiously lighter, like the the other man had pulled back some intense mental laser beam long enough for him to breathe. 

Godsall strike him, no wonder this guy was in charge of his own army. What _was_ he, part Basilisk? 

"How old are you?" 

Again the voice was frank, matter-of-fact, as if he actually _meant_ it - that he really wanted the answer, not just because he suspected a lie. That might have been the only thing that really wrung the truth out of Zack at last. 

"I'm fourteen. Sir."

There. His first night and he was balls out and swinging. 

Well… so yeah he was young. He was young but he’d done it and gotten this far hadn’t he? So Zack squared his jaw and faced those strange SOLDIER eyes and he didn't know that his own burned a hotter, brighter blue in response. 

There was a long moment of silence that stretched out to infinity under the weight of Zack's anxiety. He hadn't even seen combat yet. Would they discharge him out of contempt? What had he been _thinking?_

"I was as young and younger when I began my training," Sephiroth said at last, his words slow. The silver brows knotted as if the memory came, but with difficulty, "I knew boredom and ennui and the desire to break my bonds and prove myself. Was this how it was for you?"

Sephiroth's eyes held Zack's own with ease, but with such a deceptive mildness, Zack knew there was more going on back there than what lay on the surface. It didn’t take a mind-reader to realize that revelations like this came but seldom - if ever at all. 

Was he... apologizing... in his own way?

That was new. Commanding officers didn't confess their faults to anyone as a rule, and certainly never to a rank newbie with a chatty mouth. It made sense - Shinra didn't like to admit it, but insubordination had been a huge problem before Sephiroth had taken on the reins. Under the dubious direction of Heidigger, morale had been at an absolute low. A large part of that was because the soldiers knew when the fighting was going nowhere, even if their superiors tried to tell them otherwise. Every other week some poor bastard had gotten himself fragged by friendlies - probably out of sheer frustration more than anything. 

Sephiroth had cut that in half when he'd appeared in the arena because he had taken such an active interest in the job. Everyone had expected Shinra's newest lab rat to stay squarely in his command tent, too afraid to get his boots dirty. 

Not so, General Sephiroth. His first order of business in the Wutain theater had been to take command of the SOLDIER squads himself - where before commanders had run into the unfortunate situation of ordering around super soldiers that could essentially twist them up into a uniformed pretzel, Sephiroth was uniquely suited to the job. Any illusions the first batch of SOLDIERs might’ve had otherwise were quickly done away with the day not so long after when a Leviathan had risen up from the sea and eaten some poor trooper.

Half fish, half water lizard, the monster had nearly dwarfed a cargo ship (if you counted its giant fronded fins in the calculations) and had shaken off semi-automatic rifle fire like rain. The monster had surfaced too near a partially unloaded ship stuffed with explosives to risk using any other ordnance. 

Sephiroth had swept out into the water after it in fluid leaps and bounds - skimming the water surface like an aerial dancer and finding footholds on wet-slicked transports with an instinct observers had called inhuman. Single-handedly he had jabbed and sheared and sawed tirelessly in a leaping fight that really had lasted only about eight minutes but witnesses swore felt closer to thirty. 

Even Midgar had laughed about that story - he had gone and twined the carcass around a tree (for a day or two anyway, stuff rotted way too quickly in Wutai) - perfectly visible from Wutain telescopes. The Wutains, of course, happened to worship the monster's more divine incarnation as a guardian god.

It had been a tricky and highly divisive maneuver that had cemented roughly half the outlying villages on their side, and had reputedly sent the other half running directly to strengthen the Wutain camps. Faith was a funny thing that way. 

It had also lifted the morale of the entire army for weeks, better than any carefully-crafted speech could, and according to one chatty Third that hadn't been as big of an asshat as the others back in Midgar, it'd given Sephiroth the leverage he'd needed to really start running things his way. 

He'd waited too long. Sephiroth's face had already turned perfunctory, those eyes closely shuttered. Zack knew without needing to think about it that he wasn’t likely to ever get this kind of chance again.

"It was all your doing," he blurted out, forgetting the 'sir' in his haste. 

"...I beg your pardon?"

"I'm from Gongaga - it’s… well, I mean, it's this tiny little village down near--"

"I know it," Sephiroth told him, still looking faintly perplexed but curious in discovering where this line of conversation would lead. 

"--Well, that's the thing about small towns. There's only so much of it… but we’re not like completely isolated or anything, not with the reactor being where it is. So we have people coming through, we got the radio with maybe a handful of different stations... you know every single one likes to talk about you, right? You and every marvelous thing you’ve ever done and probably ever will.”

The General still looked faintly mystified, but he looked like he had a good idea of where Zack was meandering. “I know Shinra had begun a rather aggressive public relations campaign on my behalf several years ago.”

“Yeah, you got a collector cup and a special brand of shampoo. It wasn’t bad either, sir. Smelled like strawberries.”

“I can’t imagine why - I like mint myself.” 

Sephiroth was so deadpan he was probably _serious_ … but Zack laughed anyway, because for the first time, he thought he detected a spark of comprehension and awareness in the other man’s eyes, the forerunner to a sense of humor. For that moment, four years’ difference and a boatload of experience didn’t seem to hang so heavy between the two of them.

“I’m saying not all of it had to’ve been just stories, sir. Kids in small towns… stories about adventures are all we’ve got. I had to get out, sir. I had to get out and _do_ something, and listening about you kept me going long enough to grow up and see for myself.”

One of those brows flicked up again. “Almost.”

“Almost,” Zack agreed as nonchalantly as he could - as though he didn’t feel the the icy lump of worry twisting in his guts. “Well, I gambled, sir. I didn’t think I’d let you down. And there’s a war going on.”

The General was silent for a long moment, sitting as immovably as a statue and twice as contemplative. Zack had the teeny-tiniest suspicion that the man kept it up partially just to watch him squirm.

“I have another piece of advice,” Sephiroth said at last.

“Sir?”

“When someone offers you a full night’s sleep, you will learn it’s in your best interests to take it,” the General said with a ghost of a smile, “when I take you out deeper afield for reconnaissance, you will understand all too well."

Zack tried manfully to hide the hope in his face and failed utterly. If he'd had dog ears, they'd have perked straight up and he sure as hell knew it. _Did he mean...?_

"Sir..."

"Starting tomorrow, you will report to Sergeant Richardson," the General continued crisply. "The 109th is not quite at full strength, and could use another SOLDIER to balance out the ranks. We will reassess once your unit lands."

"Yes, sir."

"For now the 109th has orders to observe and approach the locals of Jin Hing village to the northeast. We've received word of a small splinter group of the Wutain force based in or near the village proper that may be willing to discuss more favorable terms.” 

Sephiroth’s expression didn’t change, but Zack got the impression that he thought the prospect somewhat unlikely. “The mission is to verify whether or not this is the case. You will be friendly, but you will not befriend the locals."

"I understand the distinction, sir."

Sephiroth nodded. "Richardson is a good man, and he keeps his troops in check. Mikvenn, SOLDIER First Class, leads the 109th and he is tough but he is fair."

The General pinned Zack with keen eyes. "Do you understand what I am doing?" 

Zack met his gaze with the most earnest eyes he had. “I understand respect and acceptance has got to be earned, sir. No matter how many stripes he’s got or what colors the other guy wears. And… well, I get that assessments are ongoing, not just something that happens at a certain where and when.”

The General didn’t show any outward signs of satisfaction or approval with the answer, but Zack was fairly confident he’d gotten the message. Just…

“Sir? Can I ask one thing?”

There was a short silence. “You may not ask me my reasons for doing this. Otherwise, go on.”

“I know that after tonight, with the Seconds… well, I’m sure SOLDIERs talk as much as anybody, and it’s best not to give people ideas about favoritism. I know assigning me to another unit, temporary or otherwise, removes you from the situation…” 

Zack hesitated because what he wanted to ask, what he _really_ wanted to ask seemed so… personal, right now, alone in this tent with this man who was willing to treat him like a human being.

“Ask.”

“Will you… have any part in this mission at all?”

Not quite what he wanted to ask, but anything else would be… well, presumptuous. Right? And maybe next time - if there ever was a next time - he could afford to push the envelope a little bit more, respond to that laser-beam intensity of Sephiroth’s that felt so significant… but right now, maybe he should really just…

The thought came to him as gentle as a whisper, couched in Aeris’s soft laughter. _...Stop overthinking it, silly. Believe in yourself a little._

Sephiroth was still watching him, as if sensing that he wasn’t quite finished. Zack shrugged, a little sheepish, and he knew his smile was as close to shy as it was ever gonna get. “Okay, so maybe I bought the collector cup too."

Sephiroth blinked. Then, miracle of miracles, Zack saw a faint smile play over those criminally austere features and he knew the General was a quick study... even if he did have a cripplingly underdeveloped sense of humor. 

“And the limited poster run?”

Well, well, whaddya know. Maybe the General had it in him after all. 

Zack was so tickled, he didn't even think before he spoke: "If I'd known they existed, I'd have given you kisses every night."

Uh. Gods be good, was there _any_ filter on his mouth tonight? That was way too weird of a joke to make even in risque-loving Midgar. He was forgetting his roots.

"Er. And by that I mean a big manly salute. Sir."

Actually, that didn't sound much better. 

Sephiroth never even twitched an eyelash. "They ended that particular run because too many thought I was a woman," he said matter-of-factly, not noticeably bothered by the admission, "so your comment is hardly anything compared to the letters that flooded in demanding I show more breast."

Zack... thought the General may have missed the mark somewhat on that one, but he wasn't about to provide any clarification. Just yet. 

"So that's why the uniform change?"

Early, _eaaarly_ PR shots of the General had seen him suited up in full parade dress (from the back, his pants being far more tailored than Heidigger’s could ever hope to be). It had caused quite a kerfuffle when the first pictures had appeared in the papers with this Boy General in a half-open coat. 

" _One_ reason why the uniform change."

Zack managed to shut his mouth before blurting out that he was so _not_ sorry about such a development that resulted in sneak peeks at washboard abs and what would (given a few years) probably become pecs strong enough to crack a walnut. That was... well, he was from Gongaga.

"As for the mission," Sephiroth continued, returning to the straight path of sanity with serene gravitas, "it is not under my direct oversight unless circumstances change and the intel proves good. However," he added, with that deeply assessing look of his, "I will be not be altogether a stranger. The possibilities warrant occasional progress reports, and Mikvenn does not excel in the written word."

"I'm glad, sir."

Nothing else was said - Sephiroth snapped the lights off with the finality of command and lay back down, his breathing slow and measured. Zack lay there for some time longer, grinning like a fool up at the canvas ceiling. 

There were, after all, worse ways to acquit yourself when you accidentally trample all over your childhood hero/teenage archnemesis’s hair. 

And who knew? It might be the start to such a beautiful relationship.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter started out long, and it only ever got longer in the re-telling. There were just so many adventures! I love adventures!
> 
> And yes, yes I do still call her Aeris. Aeris. Aeerrriiiissss... th. Mmf. Mm-mm. Can't do it.


	3. This Is How It Was (part 2)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Zack isn't exactly against keeping his head down, but the army's just so hard to impress sometimes, even when you dump a dead dragon at their feet. Then a mysterious meteor smashes right into the midst of a secret mission in the heart of Wutai... and everything changes once again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was posting at work because that's just what you do on lunch breaks, right? I ran out of time trying to delete all my paragraph spacing (if someone has an easy way to c/p from Drive into AO3, share me the love and the knowledge *sparkles*) so I left it at part 1 of this chapter, but this is really where we get our Wutai adventuring on.

It wasn’t easy. 

The war, not just sorting out General Sephiroth.

The man had stayed true to his word. At the crack of dawn, Zack had been firmly woken and hustled out to meet the largest man he’d ever met, with a face like granite and a rasping boom of a voice to match. This was Mikvenn, Sephiroth’s great “Warhammer of the Gods” (to hear the village Wutains call him anyway because they liked hifalutin’ names like that, the troops sometimes called him Grimmjowl although never to his face). Built like a mountain on tank treads, with twice the poker face. 

He never smiled once in the month and a half Zack ended up staying with the 109th... to the point where Zack was quite convinced if he ever tried to, that stern rock face would simply crack and crumble right off. 

That dour demeanour and unshakable confidence in the wisdom of his General was likely what made him so valuable to Sephiroth. Mikvenn was a veteran of one of the earliest campaigns into Wutai under Heidigger when casualties had been disastrously high, even for SOLDIERs. When he had advice to give, it meant something - and Sephiroth was not above listening to good advice. 

Neither was Zack for that matter, and while he’d thought he was good with his Buster, Mikvenn still had advice and criticism aplenty. In fact, the first words he'd ever said to Zack after a short conversation with the General had been about his sword: "You should be packing materia in there."

It turned out his materia was a point in his favor when it came time to inspect his gear. He hadn't gone home once his entire time at Shinra and there was only so often he could seek out Aeris under-Plate. So there was only one other real pastime for a restless teenager, and Zack had gone out after monster bounties outside the city limits whenever he had a spare minute. 

His materia may have been standard-issue and started out brand spanking new but they hadn’t stayed that way - and even if none of them were fully mastered, they were all well broken in, even his All. Which was a damn good thing because that kind of aimless forethought was what’d save his life all too soon.

Richardson hadn't exactly complimented him, but he'd been a lot less derisive than he could've been which spoke volumes all on its own. Unbound by such hierarchical strictures but not exactly verbose, Mikvenn had just nodded gravely at him in what looked like real approval. 

The General had melted away, burdened with a number of other priority responsibilities, but he spared Zack one last look over Richardson's shoulder - a level, solemn face that said, simply, _do not screw this up._

And gods knew, then and thereafter, how hard it’d been for Zack, let alone any man breathing, to live up to that promise... and what was more, to keep on it. 

It took a few weeks, but soon Zack was sent in with four others into Jin Hing - a small, rustic, but charmingly pretty village that was broken neatly in half by a thick strip of water and a surprisingly well-designed canal system, bound together by a number of wide stone bridges.

 _Look harmless_ , was the order of the day… and sometimes he wondered where half of the instructions had to come from, because something that foolish damn well hadn’t come from Mikvenn, and it sure as hell hadn’t come from General Sephiroth. Send in a unit of soldiers in full kits who don’t speak the language bar one (Second Class Ling-Yi was also a temp in the unit, but that was to be expected, translators were in exceptionally high demand) and order them to look like fluffy kittens. 

...Sure.

Very early on they were split off by the staunchly upright figures of two village elders - frail, shaking little men that looked like one stiff wind would blow them off to Ragnarok, but dressed in carefully-pressed robes and without a hair out of place.

“They request an invocation to the gods before we begin any real negotiation,” Ling-Yi announced after a rapid exchange with one of the two old men. “I will go with them to their meeting hall and I will take Rookers with me. This man,” he indicated a solemn-faced youth dressed in plain gray, with hair that hung down his back in a shiny thick rope to his hips, “will act as a translator between you and the other locals. Remember to be…” he took in their three faces, and his lip curled sardonically, "...well, be good.”

He caught Zack’s eye, and the look was perfunctory, neither disdainful nor encouraging, “It’ll be on you, hotshot. Watch your six.”

That was interesting. Zack was technically the highest ranking in the squad under Ling-Yi but he’d never exactly gotten the time to actually feel like it. Now… now a Second was personally giving him the OK. After all the digs and the shit the collective had put him through, he hadn’t expected that to feel damn good, even if he was just in for extended babysitting duty. 

Well, the regular soldiers didn’t give him nearly as much beef as the enhanced, and he was okay with sticking by them even for a cake run. “These guys’ve got me,” he said easily, nodding his head at them, “we can handle it.” 

The men at his back grinned and made approving sounds and cheerful elbow nudges at each other, but he got nothing more than a curt nod out of Ling-Yi. Rookers fell in step behind the lean, whip-thin figure of their Second as he turned neatly on a dime and trudged off after the elders. 

“You have a man like that in charge,” their guide in gray said, his eyes unreadable as he watched Ling-Yi’s retreating figure in the distance, “a Wutai man. Does your army not fear traitors in their midst?”

Sure. Zack had been closely situated with Shinra HQ for long enough to conclude that the company probably had pet names for its paranoia. Not that he was going to come right out and say it. 

“It’s a concern,” he said, his smile open and easy, “but I think traitors would be more scared of us than we are of them.”

“It is a concern,” the young man repeated, turning eyes so dark they looked black to pin Zack with that same, unreadable stare, “it is a concern always to us, who see the future rolling into our lands like a forest of Death Machines, and cannot decide at once whether to bend or to break.”

“It’s been a long war,” Almsman piped up, in a low, gravely voice, “I haven’t seen you guys do much of either.”

It was a compliment. Almsman had been on active duty long enough to cultivate a healthy respect for the faces they were fighting, and Zack liked having a clarifying voice on the matter. It was great and all to have soldiers that obeyed, but he never stopped appreciating the merits of having soldiers that could _think_ too. 

“My name is Fei,” the youth offered after a pause, as he began to lead them along the western margin of the canal village. “I help my father, we run the canals and waterways nearly all my life, ferry supplies to and from the master city. It is hard work. I have seen the teahouses where only the wealthy have the times and money to spend the hot hours at song and play. I have seen the schools where the masters train our people in wisdom and strength and magic.”

“You know your country pretty well then, don’t you?” Zack commented, his voice friendly.

Fei shrugged his shoulders noncommittally, “It is work. There is much I have not seen. And now… now I think it will all be changed no matter what happens. The old ways, they are going.”

Zack snuck a sidelong look at him, but Fei’s face said nothing; his eyes were shuttered and quiet and sad. “It sounds like you’ve thought about this.”

“For too long,” Fei agreed, stopping briefly to speak in Wutain to an old woman with iron-gray hair pulled back neatly in a severe-looking bun with a basket of local fruit - each about the size of an orange with fleshy pink leaves tipped in green. 

“Well that’s why we’re here,” Zack said, a little louder than was his usual wont in case there was anyone else listening, “there has to be a better way than to keep doing what we’ve all been doing.” 

Fei was not a tall boy, but he had a degree of thoughtfulness that seemed to lend weight to his character, and the face he turned to Zack was troubled. “That has not been the way of our people when adversity strikes,” he said slowly, choosing his words carefully, “I do not know if we are capable of changing our ways so quickly.” 

Handing over a copper coin, he bent his head to the task of choosing several of the ripest with the grave, discerning face of youth. It was with only a hint of shyness that he held three of them out to the soldiers as if a peace offering. “They are obobo, fruits of the goddess,” he said by way of explanation, demonstrating how to dig the fingernails in underneath the fleshy petals to reach the sweet, somewhat pulpy insides. 

A tiny girl with bare feet and a little red silk jacket ran up towards them, breaking away from a small group of her friends. Her coal-black hair stuck out to the sides in charming little bunches, and Zack saw that she was playing with a smudged piece of tied string between her chubby little fingers. 

She stopped dead only several feet away to bury her face behind one of the large poles that lined the canals - only so that she could peep out at the strangers with a single bright, button-dark eye.

Charmed, Zack paused to crouch down to her level, waving at her with a smile. 

Even as a Third Class, there were few adults who could look him dead in the eye without a creeping sense of unease at the strange pulses of light that played over his irises. But children were a different story. Even in jaded Midgar, there were plenty of children who would stop short and stare - and with an endearing quality of awe that adults had probably long since lost. This tiny figure didn’t even have the benefit of seeing regular SOLDIER patrols and her mouth was an open O as she stared.

“Hey there,” Zack said with a sunny smile as she side-stepped shyly out from behind the pole, never once taking her eyes off of him, “aren’t you just the prettiest thing I’ve ever seen!”

Fei looked up from his fruit when the little girl babbled something unintelligible in a high, clear voice and shuffled a few steps closer. “This is Mei-kun, second daughter of Farmer Ling,” he said, a smile breaking through the solemn gravity of his youth’s face as he held out part of his fruit to her, “she is a very curious girl.”

“Well we’re a pretty curious-looking bunch, aren’t we fellas?” Zack replied, grinning at his men as Mei-kun toddled over with sweet little baby steps; her hands reached out for the snack, but her eyes stayed firmly pinned on Zack. 

It was in the act of looking back that he caught a dark splotch amidst the firm pink flesh of the fruit basket, even before they all heard the distinct _bang-hiss_ of an older-model fuse. Time stood still as his attention was drawn magnetically to the hard olive-colored object in the old woman’s crabbed, shaking hand; her knuckles were swollen and the fingers slightly twisted with time and hard work, the skin spotted with age and paper thin, but there was no hiding the fact that what she held was a grenade and she had just yanked out the pin.

“ _GRENADE!_ ” he bellowed, the materia in his bracer blazing to life in an instant - but his words were nearly drowned out by the rumbling blast of an explosion in the distance, followed shortly by the shrill shriek-whine and thunderclap of a Bolt 2. 

His men, already primed by the first blast, split off immediately at a mad dash - and in that adrenaline-fueled SOLDIER crawl of time, he was gratified to note that at least one of them raced straight for the little girl whose eyes had grown as wide as golf balls as the world exploded into sound. 

The old woman was keening something in a high-pitched, furious shriek, eyes popping out so hard the blood vessels bulged, threatening to break on contact. She clenched it in her fist as if it were a snake. Reacting the only way he could, Zack swung his Buster in a single, fluid movement and drove the blade deep into the dirt between them, even as he reached out to jerk the startled Fei against him, shielding the boy’s head against his body, throwing an arm against his own eyes and ears, summoning up the strongest Wall he could. 

The timing was barely enough - it went off with a loud explosion that rocked the Buster back hard against his body. At that range, it would have been enough to blow out his eardrums with the concussive force, but his Wall countered it and the insidious backwash of Fire 2 all at once. 

Later, the analytical part of Zack’s mind ran through the event like a film stuck on loop… and he gave thanks to the gods that the magic had reduced what frag damage his Buster simply wasn’t wide enough to block, because he came out of with several parts shredded like hamburger, but still firmly attached. And with functional ear drums to boot.

He also gave thanks that it was an older grenade, one with a longer det time but a smaller radius than he’d thought… ten feet, otherwise his men might never have made it out of the lethal zone in time either. Even as he watched, he could see Almsman, groaning in pain with his body wrapped around the sobbing Mei-kun, but doggedly clouded in Cure. Garnsson’s head was poking up over the edge of the canal where he’d dove, water streaming from underneath his helmet. 

There was no use looking towards the old woman - a frag kill was not pretty, and the explosion had ripped through her and her wares as though they’d been paper. Even under the singed smell of meat, his nose picked out the awful scent of her perforated bowels mixing with the syrupy sweet smell of shredded fruit. 

Zack didn’t think he’d be eating the fruits of the goddess again any time soon. 

Fei was alive too, his eyes wide and unfocused, his body a shuddering, shaking mess… but still in much better shape than Zack himself who needed a direct shot of Cure 2 to even begin to feel like standing. 

But Cure 2 he did, and stand he did too, because the shrill sounds of screaming had already begun, and Mei-kun’s group of little friends, safely far enough as to be unharmed, were on the ground, shrieking over and over like a church chorus of police sirens.

A Cure wasn’t going to help that, but you never knew just how far flying metal could fly, and he wasn’t taking chances with kids, regulations or not. They screamed even louder when he approached though, and as parents and other adults started flying in, jabbering in high-pitched, foreign noises, he fell back a step, and then another, at the sheer, sweeping sense of utter uncertainty that fell down upon him like a shroud.

“I will speak to them.” The voice was small, and the eyes that looked up at him were still a little too wide, but Fei was on his feet, and his hands clasped in consternation. “I will explain them. I should have known. She lost a precious son many year when the Shinra come. I should have known. I was without thought. I did not think. I knew--”

“Steady on, kid,” Zack couldn't help cutting in, “I get it.”

Fei shook his head. “This means bad.”

He had a point there. There'd be an investigation, no bones about that. It definitely meant bad.

“I’ll make a report myself. You calm those folk for me, and I'll write it all in the way I’ve seen it. Isolated incident or so we all hope. Square?”

“Very square.” 

He beelined for the parents, his young voice high but with a growing measure of calm as he spoke rapidly and gestured expressively. The chatter didn't die, but several women who had started wailing were quieting to listen. 

“What a shitstorm,” Almsman muttered, cracking his neck and then spitting sideways into the dirt by way of relieving all unsaid feeling, “this is only going to get uglier, sir.”

“You’re not kidding,” Zack replied, shocking himself with the weary note in his own voice. Playing kitten was obviously a bust. There was nothing else they were going to accomplish here, but he wasn't gonna try and get the entire village locked up if he could help it. “--All right, boys. Radio it in. We're going to investigate that explosion and see about the rest of our own. Cured and ready?”

“As we’re gonna be,” Garnsson replied ruefully, shaking his head like a puppy so that the canal water spattered in the dust around him. “You knew what you were about with that Barrier, sir.”

“Wall,” Zack replied with a shadow of his usual grin, “you never know what kind of materia shards they'll toss into the mix for flavoring."

"You probably saved my life with that, sir," Almsman offered gravely, "holding out the front line where you did. I only caught the backwash and that was plenty."

Zck spared a sideways glance as they began jogging at a soldier's pace towards the thick black smoke and strong scent of char off in the distance where their fellows had gone. In these latter years of the war, it was rare to see one of the old-timers from the early days of the Shinra force - before it had even been known as an army. 

For those men, those who had seen so much action and had thrown their lives into the balance so frequently, a tradition had sprung up never to give thanks for the saving of a life. As Zack understood it, it was a sign of respect and brotherhood... an acknowledgement that such was something you didn't need to ask for, nor should you express surprise or gratitude when it was given.

The notion had been left largely by the wayside in the headlong rush to build what would soon become the full strength of the Shinra army, but here and there the tradition still persisted, curiously resistant to becoming stamped out completely. 

He said nothing, but when Almsman gave him an assessing, sidelong look, Zack gave him a brisk nod to indicate that he'd understood.

He didn't need to look again to sense the solid warmth of this grizzled old hero's approval.

"Step lively, boys," he said, marveling at the incongruity of being the youngest of the three and yet still the one giving the orders, "it sounds like they're in need of backup."

It was on the cusp of his hearing; the sharp clang of steel on steel, the brisk chatter of gunfire, and the charged edge of ozone to the air as magic was called. If he could barely hear it, it probably meant that the unenhanced at his back wouldn't - but they were smart, and there was no mistaking the second crashing sizzle of a Bolt spell going off in the distance. 

He picked up the pace. “Hastes at the ready!”

“Sir!”

Conversation lapsed as they broke into a fast jog, Zack pacing himself to his men. Today wasn't the day for one-man heroics, and he wasn't going to risk leaving these guys behind. 

Temple pennants flapped as they approached, the faint puffs of of ocean-carried breezes coming off the water at this one remote point north of the village proper. Strange rock formations were set up here and lovingly polished so that you could see the exposed veins of materia catch the light. The encroaching jungle was clipped resolutely back, webs of red string weaving the branches into a loose wall. 

There was no mistaking which way the trouble was. 

The crashing roar- _whoomph_ of fire stormed across the ground towards them like a Limit, sending Zack skidding to a stop, Buster already spinning into his grip. At a glance it was already the tailing end of a spell so Zack didn't bother summoning the power for another Wall, and braced for it. 

It didn't come. There was a tiny shiver and near-audible _ping_ of a Hasted MBarrier that rose up like a curtain dead ahead of him - and so he used that instead, digging the balls of his feet into the dirt and leaping forward so that the tip of his sword drove a wedge through the flames and scattered the embers. 

“Good call, Garnsson,” he tossed over his shoulder as his men never broke pace to reach him, “Keep that handy.”

He didn't even pay attention to Garnsson’s affirmative because he was already cresting the hill--

“Holy _shit!_ ”

\--why had no one told him here there'd be fucking _dragons?_

Later he'd be told that there weren't supposed to be… although he wouldn't be privy to know (then) that the reigning theory was leaked mako from a nearby abandoned reactor, set up in the days before Wutain pushback, was the probable cause of a monster mutation.

Most of the creature was a shining, oily green; it refracted the filtered jungle light with the deep gleam of imperfect emeralds. Its underbelly, swelling as it paused for a breath, was amethyst, the deepest purple of the stones mined near del Sol, pulsing with the glow of its internal fire. 

There was nothing jewel-like about the teeth though, or the talons. Each a foot long, the front claws flexed and shone like steel as glowing blue eyes narrowed, scanning in his direction. 

“Fair!”

Ling-Yi was smoking - literally - two short swords crossed in front of him, immersed in a cloud of green. Just behind him Zack could see the crumpled figures of the village elders, their white robes dragged in the dirt. And a little way away from _them_ …

Rookers looked like a side of beef. His chest had been torn wide open, the meat raw and hanging off his ribs in tatters. In contrast, his face was burned black; his eyes had burst. Zack could taste the bile in the back of his throat when he realized the only reason he could recognize Rookers as himself was because of the size of the man’s still-intact thighs. Rookers had been able to crush a Bandersnatch skull between them like a boiled egg.

That was all the time he got because the dragon inhaled with a loud sucking sound, snapping his attention back to the monster. 

“MBarrier up, sir!”

Garnsson was a gift from the gods. Zack whipped his sword up and leapt directly into the flames. The heat scoured his face like a furnace but the magic kept him from burning. The edge of his Buster raked a line across the dragon’s small, tapered, but well-armored muzzle with unfortunately little effect. 

Good thing that hadn’t been his end goal. Zack ended up paces away from Ling-Yi, as the dragon reared back, whipping its head to and fro with an angry roar, scrabbling at the air with its forelegs. “How ya doing, man?” he asked, already visually assessing for damage. 

The wounds had closed, but there was clear evidence of claw marks in the shredded canvas of Ling-Yi’s pant leg and the remnants of Fire damage to the side of his face. 

“Cured it,” Ling-Yi replied shortly, “Materia’s running near empty.”

Zack strongly suspected a large chunk of it had been pumped into Rookers, whether or not to any effect. He didn’t ask. “Boys had my back. I’m not full but I got some in me.” 

“Gonna need it,” Ling-Yi replied, readying his blades again, “got Ice?” 

“Yeah.”

“Use it. Nothing else.” 

A split-second later, it took all the SOLDIER reflexes in both of them to take standing leaps away from where they’d been crouched as the dragon’s tail crashed through the trees next to them, splintering trunks with a sound like Thor’s hammer. The dragon roared again, lunging at Ling-Yi with claws and teeth. 

Zack was moving again, airborne and swinging with the momentum at the back of the beastie’s head, just under the sharp curve of its protective crest. The squeal of his steel against the scales was high-pitched and sharp, but several thick drops of blood flew, hissing as it spattered in the dirt.

“Watch for when it opens its mouth,” he called to his men, rifles still ready but prudently not shooting, not yet. “I want him distracted but not enough to go charging at you.” 

“Gods will it, sir!”

That was all he got out before he was ducking a handful of claws himself - the dragon rolled with more fluidity than its size gave it credit for. The next thing he knew, the damned tail batted him right out of the air and slammed him hard down into the dust, crushing the air out of his lungs. 

Gods fuck him, he’d never liked his ribs anyway. 

He lay there for a split second, trying to remember how to breathe when Ling-Yi went flying over him like a Hasted bobcat, executing a series of unnaturally graceful leaps along the curving slope of the twisting dragon’s back, punching his swords repeatedly into the meat between its shoulders. With a frustrated roar, the dragon reared back, crashing down onto the dark-haired Second like a ton of falling rocks. 

The loud reports of gunfire chattered and echoed in the grove as his men opened fire, the shrill pinging of bullets glancing off the damned thing’s hide, and a sharp squeal as one lucky shot caught it in the mouth. 

Zack was on his feet, the magic flowing through his fist as he summoned up the chill wind of an Ice3 with grim desperation. Snow swirled, utterly improbable in the wet heat of the jungle and the dragon’s head jerked up, slitted and staring in surprise. 

It took a second later for the giant ice shards to coalesce, suspended in the air, glittering and deadly, but it took less than half for them to plunge deep into their mark, punching straight through flesh and bone as though the armor were but a dream. Zack thought he’d hear that dragon’s howl echoing in his ears until Ragnarok fell.

The shards exploded, and swiftly melted away into nothing, but the holes they made remained, sizzling and steaming as the heat of the dragon’s blood transmuted his magic into vapor.

But it was enough. The dragon’s head fell to the ground with a crash as the rest of its body shuddered and then collapsed in a boneless sprawl. 

With a cold sense of practicality, Zack reached down and grabbed the creature by the snout, wrenching its jaws open and burying the full length of his buster sword into the soft palate of the creature’s mouth. Just to be safe. 

Then he jammed his sword into the dirt and threw his weight against the dragon’s side, heaving with what strength he had to push and shove and lift the thing off his fellow SOLDIER. 

Almsman came up next to him, rifle slung onto his back, but Garnsson following with his weapon still prudently out and at the ready. The older man didn't have the strength of a SOLDIER, but he'd been working with them for a long time, and he picked up one of the broken flagpoles - a long, thick-cut piece of wood - and jammed it underneath the dragon to help lever it up. 

It also helped that Ling-Yi was a SOLDIER, and a badass in his own right, because even with a mountain of dead dragon on him, he was still conscious and straining to get out. 

“Hey, hey, hey, I’mma need to ask you to stand back, sir!”

Zack turned to see Garnsson with rifle up, and then further to see that one of the tribal elders was close, his robes torn and singed, his hands held out in a gesture of pacification, open and empty. 

But as far as Zack knew, the old men might’ve been the ones that sicced the beastie on his fellows in the first place, and he wasn’t going to take any more chances just yet. They already had one body to bury.

The old man’s voice rose, timorous and thin, hands moving and pointing as if trying to explain, but it was all gibberish to Zack, who hadn’t been here long enough to pick up any of the lingo. Sweat beading into his eyes, he shut them, throwing his weight forward against the iron-hot scales of the dragon’s hide just enough to--

“He says,” a voice muttered at his feet, so suddenly he nearly jumped and lost his hold, “that this pig-fucking demon snake was not their doing and he begs you to take his miserable life in exchange for sparing his village from death and torture.” 

“Loki-loving _bastard_ ,” Zack swore, bracing the weight with one shoulder while he reached down to grab Ling-Yi by the armpit, doing his best to drag him out from under. “You are a damn hard son of a bitch to kill.” 

“Nnnmph,” was all he got in return. 

“Garnsson,” he ordered, making the call, “leave be and help me get our man out. We’ll sort these guys after.” 

“Sir!”

That was easier, though Ling-Yi allowed himself a quiet groan of pain as they yanked him out inch by jerking inch. Garnsson, with full use of both arms, eased the Second onto the ground a prudent distance away from the dead dragon and charged up a quick Cure, a soft puff of green that clouded Ling-Yi’s body and sunk down into his skin. 

With a grunt, Zack dumped the dead beast unceremoniously into the dirt, grimacing at the scratches in his shoulder-guards and his gloves where the dragon scales had bit wickedly in, though they hadn’t quite cut through. 

“We should skin the beastie and wear it like a suit of armor. They will know us as the Bane of Jormungandr and our enemies will tremble.”

“I like the Bane of the Pig-fucking Demon Snakes myself, sir,” Garnsson offered, “has a certain poetic ring to it.”

That wrung a short grunt of laughter from Ling-Yi, punctuated by a hiss of pain, “I may have paraphrased.” 

“You are one badass son of a bitch,” Zack said as he watched the man sit up gingerly, after just one Cure, “I said it once, I’m sayin’ it again. You just took a mountain of lizard to the teeth and came out swinging.” 

“Perhaps the Professor knew what he was about after all,” was all Ling-Yi said on the subject, his mind already on more important things like the little old man that still had his hands out in pacification. A rapid stream of dialogue commenced, Ling-Yi’s voice rasping but already with a hint of his customary briskness. 

“I think we will need to take this man with us,” he said at last, “we will need to report this situation and there will need to be questioning. We will let Hing-Tun, the other elder, go back to the village and explain what has happened here. And then we will see about this splinter group.” 

“Yessir,” Zack replied, helping the other man back up onto his feet. Bastard bounced back _fast_. Sheer bravado kept him from complaining about the fact that he’d nearly had his ribs caved in by swinging dragon tail. It just didn’t have the same oomph in comparison.

“You’ve got a good stack of crystal,” Ling-Yi added, glancing sidelong at him, “Greenies don’t usually come with full bars. Did good.” 

That was more than he’d gotten out of any Second to date, and hell Zack would take it. 

*

If he’d harbored secret hopes that this was the turning point, he was sorely mistaken. A good word from one Second (especially one who was always under constant scrutiny himself for his Wutain origins) was not nearly enough to change the minds of a sea of SOLDIERs, and certainly not overnight. 

And if he’d hoped that the dragon incident would be reason enough to see the General again, he was also sorely mistaken. Mikvenn took his statement with the unshakeable calm of a cliff face, gave nothing but absorbed everything, and sent the information on up. Ling-Yi sent the village elder up the ranks, and reported that the General _did_ meet with the man, and spoke to him at length, but in the end, earned Shinra nothing but a tenuous friendship with the village proper. No real Wutain forces. 

But when all was said and done, it was far better than when they tried to make friends with the staunchly defensive Wutain villages that would have nothing to do with the invaders - except to kill them where they could. It was these that showed a cold, implacable ferocity that put the old obobo seller to shame. 

‘Least she hadn’t used the kids.

 _Those_ were the images and sounds and smells that could keep Zack up at nights if he let them. 

And yet… 

Things weren’t a total loss. The 109th closed ranks around him; the un-enhanced were a lot easier to impress when you lug a dead dragon back to base, and a lot less resentful about how well your body ate up toxic chemicals. They stuck by him like glue whenever any enterprising SOLDIERs took it upon themselves to bitch just a little too loudly - and in the end, his willingness to put in work and an utterly irreverent sense of humor won them over to a man. Even when his own unit finally showed up at the front, Mikvenn himself put in a formal request to let him stay - and secretly wrote his own recommendation for Zack’s promotion to Second that he sent quietly along to the General for consideration. 

The General listened and acknowledged the suggestion and, he confessed some time later, had considered caution to be paramount in the delicate Fair situation. He’d thought it better for Zack to remain a Third for some time longer - in essence, for the rest of the army to get used to him just as he was. 

That wasn’t good enough for Shinra though. If there was room for another Second, they were down to pump more of their mako into him. And Zack was as motivated for the promotion as Shinra was. 

So back to Midgar he went, back through the physicals and the psych evals and the extra training. While there, Zack quietly celebrated his fifteenth birthday with uncharacteristically little fanfare. As far as he was concerned, the quicker he made it to the proper age of enlistment, the better because it didn't look like the war was ending any time soon. 

It did feel good to get away from it though, at least for a little while. He had no desire to stay here forever - regardless of what they were fighting for, those were his people roped into it all, and by gods he was going back there to stand square by them - but it was nice to sleep in a real bed and feel like you’d be safe enough doing it. 

And to wear dry socks pretty much 24/7. The General hadn’t been kidding, Zack had seen far more vicious forms of funky foot mold than he’d care to revisit in a lifetime. One poor private had come home with fuzzies that _glowed_. Medhold had had a field day over that one.

He wasn't allowed out this time though - Aeris might know where he was but she wasn't getting in, and unless he wanted to spend the rest of the war in jail, he wasn't getting out. After so much time spent in Wutai, Shinra just didn't want any news - positive, factual, or otherwise - to disseminate through Midgar that wasn't vetted directly through their extensive PR team first. 

Then he got hit with the new round of mako injections and wasn’t nearly half as happy as he was going in. 

It fucking _hurt._ More than the first time, more than _anything_ \- they strapped him down, the belts each as wide as his wrist, against which he threw himself with all his weight, all the combined strength of a SOLDIER Third Class. The stuff burned like fire going in and then seemed to build momentum as it surged through his bloodstream, following the pounding double-time rhythm of his racing heart. He screamed but they forced another belt between his teeth to save his tongue, and there was a First holding him down by main strength where the belts didn’t, talking him down in a voice that ran like a smear in his brain, wordless and unintelligible. 

Hours. It lasted _hours_. 

But when it was over… Zack nearly snapped the table in two with a roar like a Behemoth that built up from his belly and seared through the ceiling with the blue-white lightning of a Limit Break. He opened his eyes to the First’s best poker face, and a battery of gun barrels trained on his chest. 

“You’re gonna want to sober up fast there, brother,” the First was saying in a low, calm, quiet voice (later, Zack would learn that this was Hama, SOLDIER First Class and ad hoc SOLDIER therapist), “no need to make the greenies nervous, right? You’re doing good, yeah you’re doing just fine.” 

“Nngh gahhrh nnm?”

“It’ll be all good real soon, man,” the First continued, “the mako messes with your neural pathways for a little while - messes with everything, actually. But it’ll settle, man, it’ll settle. You’ll get your tongue back, no sweat.” 

It was a good lie, and Zack believed him. It took a long while to learn that sometimes the new SOLDIERs just didn’t figure themselves out - their neurons never did learn to start firing right, and they were left no better than vegetables. Scarier still, they were quietly taken off active duty and scheduled for more in-depth testing with Dr. Hojo himself.

(This was far less terrifying a prospect in reality than in Zack’s night sweats, mostly because Dr. Hojo never really realized that sometimes you learned as much from your failures as you did from your successes… but it also meant that a lot of them never resurfaced to go home to their families either.)

But the mako did settle. Without Aeris’s touch, it took days for Zack to relearn fine motor control - but this time, it was a pleasure. It was like being able to feel every well-oiled tumbler in a set of locks slowly click into place - but this was his own _body_ , and he watched as each new piece came back to life stronger, better in every way. 

A week later he was blitzing through the advanced Training Room like a demon through Hel - and not even feeling it. He in fact felt fucking _invincible_ … although just not invincible enough to bust out of Shinra and take off down under the Plate long enough to see Aeris and tell her so without some serious consequences.

He hated to make her worry, but there was nobody he’d trust to send down there if he couldn’t go himself. So he was stuck - in a cycle of interviews, psych evals, and a number of med checks where he was poked and prodded in more places than he’d like to admit. Even if the nurses were damn cute, they just couldn’t hold a candle to a certain gardener goddess from the slums.

It didn’t take living through a war to tell him he still had it pretty bad.

So when they gave him the OK to get back to the war, he took it and he went. And he did it still pretty down he hadn’t been able to hit up his girl (well, not quite _his_ girl, but... you know) while he had the chance. 

\--That was the only excuse he had for not noticing the knife until someone rammed it right into his guts. 

*

He woke up on a hospital cot, looking up into the startled eyes of a nurse. For a moment he didn’t even think anything of it - he’d been in and out of beds like this waiting on med checks for several weeks now after his mako rounds.

Then his hands hit the gauze wadded up and wrapped neatly around his stomach and he remembered. “Wha--?”

“I know it’s probably cliché to boys like you by now to say,” the nurse said with a wry twinge of her mouth, “but you’re lucky to be alive, SOLDIER or no.”

“I… Stabbed. I didn’t see who...?” 

She shook her head - she had fine, curly blond hair that probably would have looked quite smart if it wasn’t bound back as tightly as possible under her olive cap, and stuck to her forehead in wet strands from the heat. “Neither did the guys who found you, or so they say. Few of them from the 307th, just about to switch on for patrol duty. You’ve got quite the rep as a hotshot around here, and they recognized you.”

The smile that passed over Zack’s face was twisted at the corners and came out a grimace. “Truly not what I was gunning for, I assure ya.” 

The nurse (Willsbrun, she told him soon after) didn’t reply, opting instead to explain what had happened. “Looks like it was a straight blade - which is all the better for you, by the way. Slid right in and your bowels just squished out of the way around it. No serration, no sawing on the way in or out, very little contamination. No poison. Knowing you SOLDIERs, you might even have walked away from it. Wouldn’t have happened that way if it were a bullet, you know.” 

“But I didn’t. Walk away from it either, I mean.”

“Well that’d be the soreness in your brainpan, sir,” the nurse replied, and Zack noticed the bandage around his head for the first time, tufts of his hair sticking up wildly through the wrap job, “somebody gave you a pretty nasty love tap while you weren’t looking. You’ve got SOLDIER-level healing so the rest of bruising’s already gone - but you should’ve seen your pretty face when you came in.” 

“So you’re thinking I got jumped. Sneaky ninja assassins?” 

There was another long, pregnant pause in which she prodded the dressing at his side with the firm, assessing pads of her fingertips. Then: “Off the record, sir, I don’t think you should be walking around alone at night. Even here on base.” 

...Those mother _fuckers_ …

“He won’t be.” 

Both of them froze. Poor Nurse Willsbrun was halfway through the act of unrolling Zack’s bandage, which prompted an awkward, aborted dive into his lap for the blood-stiffened dressing that dropped through the unraveling webs of gauze. 

She bumbled through an apology as General Sephiroth stepped closer, keen eyes taking in the closed wound at his side, and the healthy pink of healing scar tissue without a word. 

“I was afraid something like this would happen,” he said at last, voice pitched low for privacy. Willsbrun looked startled to be caught in the confidence of the Demon General himself, but stood her ground with the absolute minimum of fluttering. 

Zack liked her.

He also had no idea what he could possibly say to the General. It wasn’t like he should apologize - he had only done exactly what he said he’d try and do. He’d tried to stick around, do his job, and keep his head down as much as he was able. So he looked the General dead in the eye. “I’ve done my best, sir.” 

“I know. And your work has been… commendable.”

One word, and yet from the General it was high praise. Zack felt the warm heat of pride in his chest, even though the rest of him was cold with the will it took to watch the General determine his fate.

Sephiroth surprised him. 

“You’ve done as I’ve asked. You have acted in accordance with my orders and that of your superior officer. You have demonstrated acts of quick thinking, bravery, and leadership in the face of challenge. You have behaved well and I could not have asked for better. This has not changed the fact that resentment follows you wherever you go and whatever you do. I have received several recommendations to put you behind a desk or place you back at HQ to train new recruits.” 

Zack’s face was bland, blank to military perfection... but it changed nothing of the ice crystallizing in the pit of his stomach. It was true, he’d do just fine behind a desk. He was good with people, give him a few years and hell he’d probably even _like_ teaching. 

But not now. He was balls deep in this and as much as he wanted out sometimes, he had so much higher to climb. If he got pulled out, he’d never make it to First Class. And Firsts were the only ones who--

“As a rule, I don’t usually take Seconds.” 

Zack tried not to blink. “No, sir.”

Usually? Try _never_. His brain was a loop of don’t-hope-don’t-hope-don’t-hope - but hell, it didn’t stop his heart and that damn thing was hoping like no tomorrow.

“In this particular case, I believe we have already followed the usual protocol as far as I’m inclined to. I hate to see wasted potential and I see it in you.”

“Thank you, sir.” 

“I am a proud person,” Sephiroth continued quietly, as though the serene shield of his brow somehow indicated a man wallowing in hubris, “and I do not enjoy bullying. They are the actions of frustrated, unworthy men.”

Someone had been listening to all the Boy General comments after all.

Willsbrun stirred. “Shall I leave you two, sir? Fair is well, he won’t even need the bandage in a few hours at the rate he’s healing. I can assure you privacy.”

Sephiroth’s eyes slid to her, and Zack was close enough to feel her stiffen under his gaze. “My apologies. I did not mean to make you uncomfortable.”

“I’m not, sir,” she replied, to Zack’s surprise, “if I were being frank, I would tell you how I appreciate what you see in the boy-- ahh, in Fair. But he’s not our only patient in here, and whether they’ve got enhanced hearing or not, we’re all only human in the end and this is terribly interesting stuff.”

Sephiroth paused, digesting her words - then a small smile flickered to life. “Commendable. I appreciate the gesture. It’s quite alright, I only have one other thing to tell you, Fair.” 

“Sir?”

“Hela take them all,” Sephiroth said with quiet gravitas, as if he weren’t overthrowing three entire chapters’ worth of the Shinra handbook in one sentence, “I am curious to see you in action, and I don’t believe that petty jealousy should overshadow personal merit.”

 _Holy shit._ The General was an intense son of a bitch, and Zack was going to go to his grave remembering the deep, velvety matter-of-factness that was _Hela take them_. “You mean to say…” 

“This is not a promotion, not in the strictest sense. A great deal goes into the making of a SOLDIER First Class and if you deserve a place among them, you will earn it in due time as all should. But I don’t think we will wait until we are both old and bitter to be… better acquainted.” 

_Acquainted? Aw hell no_. “I think you mean ‘friends’. Sir.” 

Willsbrun made a sound. He glanced at her. She gave him eyes that said, quite clearly, that he’d really gotten something messed up badly in his brainpan after all. 

Maybe that could be his excuse. The nurse would probably back him up in a plea for temporary insanity. But he knew, he _knew_ with that kind of bone-deep instinctive knowing you just went with, that there were protocols the General was shredding to pieces just to hang onto him and that that was significant. The least he could do was do something equally as out-of-step and just as downright instinctive.

It wasn’t a crime to say what you really wanted sometimes, right?

A silver eyebrow rose, so elegantly shaped Zack wondered in a blind panic of random thought whether maintaining that perfection was a military expense. “Well,” General Sephiroth said at last, “I suppose that remains to be seen.” 

*

Talk about easier said than done. 

It was not an easy ride working under the General directly. Zack’s clearance level probably doubled in the space of a day, and even with super healing he got a cramp in his hand just from signing his own damn name more than 20 times in triplicate. That was nothing to the required reading that, in any other line of work on the Planet, would require a lawyer present, and then probably a team of them to decipher.

He thought there’d be trouble in the SOLDIER ranks, but the second he was ushered under Sephiroth’s direct command, all outward resentment vanished. Maybe they didn’t respect _him_ much, but the SOLDIERs loved their General and if he said Zack Fair belonged, then hell, he was one of them - and the ones who privately disagreed knew better than to bitch out loud.

And because he was a special case, the General pushed him hard. He was not always kind and he had zero tolerance for excuses - not once did he ever allow Zack the luxury of thinking that because he was a Second mixed in with Firsts, that he would be given a handicap. He was expected to keep up, and if he could not… well, that would be a disappointment that neither Zack nor the General had any desire to discuss. 

But he was fair. Which was both a gift and a curse in some respects, at least as far as career advancement meant. Certainly, there was no meteoric rise for Zack in that league - it was a lot harder to distinguish yourself amongst a company of longtime Firsts, and Sephiroth was not easily impressed. But despite his own streak of ambition, Zack was fairly content with the situation. After all, he’d been gunning so hard for a top spot because he wanted a part in the Boy General’s adventures. He had that now, and so much more besides.

Sephiroth… talked to him. Not only as a subordinate, but as a… friend. Kind of. Maybe.

\--All right, it was too tenuous a bond to really fare well under hard scrutiny or took too kindly to labels. But… dammit, it was a _start_. 

Sephiroth listened, he answered back, he gave that quiet, stilted smile at times and once, only once, he’d even been coerced into a laugh - a quiet, surprised burst of sound that was like music to Zack’s ears. He hadn’t even blushed. Much.

And it wasn’t all in Zack’s head. Sephiroth was doing things his way and there was no one around brave enough to tell him no.

In the days leading up to Zack’s sixteenth birthday (for _real_ this time), new intelligence surfaced about a meeting place of top-tier Wutain warriors hidden in a secret Temple of Water. In the flurry of executive excitement that followed, it was quickly determined that General Sephiroth himself would lead the recon party. Along for the ride were three of his strongest swimmers, and Zack, who was _not_ one of his strongest swimmers, but was strong enough to play porter for the emergency oxygen tank. 

The General wasn’t about to walk into a secret ninja temple dedicated to a god of water without putting a few contingencies in place. 

He also knew full well that there were plenty of others under his command that could handle the job as well or better than Zack… and Zack knew it too. But he was also learning that the General had let the dice fly high the day he’d come to Zack’s bedside and taken him in as one of his own. Zack was coming because the General wanted him there. 

_Hela take them._

Yeah. Fuck ‘em all. 

He was glad to be here. _Glad_. To Hel with the others, he’d been ducking his head for the sake of everyone else’s pride long enough. Time to have some of his own. 

“Interrupting your daydreams, Princess?” a voice murmured from behind him, startling him back to the task at hand, braiding the wiring so that they wouldn’t tangle on the emergency lights he was rigging up. The gleaming amber gold of SOLDIER eyes in the darkness were nearly all he could pick out in the gloom, but he could hear the faint smirk. 

“Only about our torrid love affair in Del Sol,” he shot back with a grin. 

“Hah. Sun, sand, and beach bunnies playing volleyball in Corelian thong bikinis? Your mouthy ass wouldn’t stand a chance.”

“You wound me, Gerber. I thought we had something.”

The SOLDIER snorted. “Grow up some, little boy. Then maybe we’ll talk.” 

Zack was bright enough, and had been in a fairly Y-chromosome-only environment for long enough, to realize that that… wasn’t exactly a _no_ , either. It was the kind of pregnant silence that held possibilities. Maybe not now, but. You know. There.

Well, damn. He hadn’t _thought_ he’d been flirting.

Guess it beat the alternative. Hazing was no fun even when your reflexes were at the top of their game. So long as he didn’t get any more knives stuck in his back. (Or up his backside, as the case may be.)

“Do you think this scintillating conversation might wait until our mission is complete?” asked a quiet voice in the darkness, somehow still mellifluous in spite of its dry tones, that had both Zack and Gerber ramrod straight and saluting in a fraction of a second.

That the General had managed to sneak up on a First and Second Class SOLDIER all at once was a testament to his personal path of the ninja.

“Yes, sir!” “Sorry, sir!” they said, all at once (albeit at a loud whisper). 

“At ease.” The voice didn’t change, but Zack _thought_ he detected a single note of amusement. “Is it done?”

Frigga bless that he’d finished the last few connectors during their banter. “Yessir. Ready on your orders.”

“Good. Follow through to the central chamber. It ends two stories above - I have the others stationed at a lookout directly across from you. The braziers down at the bottom have just been lit. Bring the tank. You will observe from above.”

There was a pause. “You are also our exit - if there is trouble, hit the lights. The others can get to you, but you will need to keep the way clear. You and I will give them that time.”

As plans went, there was a lot of trust on their end. The lights would draw enemy attention like bugs to… well… light.

But they’d found that the way into the chambers was riddled with passageways, multiple entries, and unexpected dead ends. If they had any hope of getting out quickly and in one piece, they were going to have to mark it for their people. 

“Understood, sir.”

The tall shadow of the General slipped away further into the gloom and down a side passage. Zack caught the soft gleam of silver hair, neatly clubbed at the nape, and the last whispering creak of soft leather before that presence disappeared, and he relaxed infinitesimally. 

“That was almost a joke,” Gerber murmured thoughtfully, falling in step next to him as Zack heaved the heavy tank onto his back as quietly as he could, “didn’t know the big man had it in him.”

“Hmm?”

Gerber cocked his head in the direction that General had gone. “Seen him when he first got here. Was like working for a machine. AI type shit. Smart as anything, but always that tiniest bit off. Took too long looking at you, like he had to stop and process the sense of it all first. Was pretty spooky.”

“Dude, you trained into Shinra through Engineering. Those guys are neck-and-neck with the accountants for awkward turtling.”

“Sure, and you'd be the first guy with the balls to try and call the General a turtle,” the chatty First said with a grunt as he swung his pack up onto his shoulders and they started creeping deeper into the tunnels, “he's too badass to be lumped in with the nerd squad.”

“He does have very impressive talents in skewering water snakes, I’ll give you that. Tell me that isn’t proof positive of a sense of humor.”

“Dark.”

“Extremely, but we all gotta start somewhere.”

And then Zack came to a complete and abrupt stop thanks to Gerber’s arm that shot out directly in front of his chest. 

He looked down and realized that the ground was gone, the crumbling edge mere inches away from his toes. A yawning chasm gaped like a silent scream. At the very bottom in the murky darkness he could see an enormous pool of water, studded with gleaming white stalagmites. What looked like a series of smoothed-down white stones made a path out into the center of the enormous cavern where a rock platform, the biggest yet and perfect round, stood. Dead center and 20 feet tall was a gilded statue of Leviathan, its shining coils wound around a giant sword. Banners with mottos in giant, stark brushstrokes about power, worship, and patriotism fanned out on either side and a small constellation of candles waited, lit and flickering. 

Even for a SOLDIER that was a long way down to fall. And he just didn’t have those anti-gravity powers the General seemed to carry around in his back pocket.

“Have I mentioned to you lately that I love you? ‘Cause I do man. I really do.”

Gerber’s laugh was a soft huff, nothing more. “You’re all right, Fair. For a smart mouth. Wouldn’t want to see it yapping without all those pretty teeth.”

“What we give in blood, sweat, and tears, we get back in dental insurance premiums.” 

But he got the hint, and he shut his pretty claptrap. Carefully, he hunkered down next to the First, peeping over the edge as they waited for a signal, any signal, that called for an emergency retreat. Somewhere above and below, the SOLDIERs and the General were circling, watching and waiting for an enemy war session to begin. 

All was still, silent; only the tinkling, eternal splash of moving water far below echoed over the stones. If there was a secret ninja meeting here, they were either really good at their jobs, or the Shinra expedition had a long wait ahead of them. 

To this end, Zack settled in with a quiet internal sigh. Patience was a virtue and one in precious little supply in your teenage years. To slow down his thoughts and his tapping fingers, he began mentally drafting a letter home. 

\--And then he realized all of a sudden that when he’d thought of _home_ , he’d thought immediately of Aeris and not of his parents. 

When had that happened? 

He’d written to his mom during his short time back in Midgar. The usual stuff: that he was fine, doing well, about the new promotion. That he missed her, you know? Hadn’t wanted her to worry.

His dad had answered instead.

He’d had the good sense not to put anything incriminating down on paper (not even out in the country did the people trust Shinra propaganda any further than they could throw it) but he’d said enough. Between the two of them, Zack gathered that his dad had been the understanding one - the country life didn’t hold much savor for the restless and his dad got that. His mom though… 

\-- _If you come back, she’ll be there, she’ll listen to your stories. But not before then.--_

Yeah. That wasn’t gonna happen. Not if he had anything to say about it. 

_Sorry, Mom,_ he thought ruefully. It’d be nice if he could’ve stayed and been the good son. It’d’ve certainly been easier, even if it meant foregoing the strength to bench press a sport bike. But there too, Zack believed more than anything that life just wasn’t worth living if you kept doing it in half measures. 

\-- _so I’d love to tell you about all these adventures, doll, but you know me, I’m just no good at writing it all down. I guess you’ll have to wait ‘til I get back, let you in on all these thrilling heroics in person._

_Not all of it’s been easy stuff, that I gotta admit. I never figured that war was gonna be easy in any way, but I didn’t know how bad some of this stuff was gonna be, y’know? I don’t think that even when I do get back you’re going to hear about all of it. Some parts got dark real quick, and I’d rather you didn’t have to live with those nightmares like I’ll have to._

_But I’ve got stories about these guys - how they just don’t give up. That’s what’s gonna win us this war. I’ve gotta tell you about the General and how he went out on a limb for me._

_I’ve gotta tell you how much I miss you. I’m counting the days until I can get back--_

The sudden stink of ozone stung his nostrils, and Zack went still, locking eyes with Gerber, whose golden SOLDIER eyes had narrowed down to slits. They peered over the edge carefully, looking for the telltale spark of a summon… but there was nothing down there except darkness. 

_Scrrrrrreeeeeeeee----_

With the shrill scream, what sounded like a Bolt 3 whistling down overhead that made the both of them duck and cover - and then an explosion rocked the mountain itself, the stone shuddering beneath their feet. Zack scrambled to grab hold of the packs to make sure their harnesses held and the emerg tank didn’t plummet down off the narrow ledge. Giant crags of rock that had hung from the ceilings for centuries snapped off like kindling, huge deadly spikes hurtling down into the abyss, smashing on the stone discs in the center, or thundering into the pool of rushing water. 

Through the broken seams high up in ceilings, they could smell the astringent greenness of unfiltered Lifestream, they saw the green-white glow of power that shone briefly like the sun then went out like the death of a star. 

“What the hell--” 

_A trap?_

“We got someone down there!” Gerber hissed, casting his eyes frantically into the darkness. Far down in that inky darkness, Zack heard, very faintly, a deep, sobbing groan of pain.

 _Shit._

“Fair, Gerber.”

 _The General._ With the grace of a bat, and the quiet rustle of leather, Sephiroth scrambled down from above as though he’d been crawling around on the rock face itself. “Hurt?”

“No, sir.”

The look on Sephiroth’s face was unreadable as he held out something shiny in the palm of his hand - dog tags. “Schreiber is dead.”

 _Holy shit_. That was their man up above.

“His throat was slit. I found more knife wounds on his body. They know that we’ve come.”

There were more sounds below however, and the three of them peered down to see lights flooding in, dark shapes whipping from one stone to the next leaping for the central stone. One massive piece of rock had smashed directly into the statue - the majority of Leviathan still stood stalwart, but the stones had severed the great worm’s neck, and the god’s head lay in pieces amongst the fallen banners. 

The sounds they were hearing were angry, enraged. They could see groups of them crowding around the statue, weapons drawn, the sworn oaths of revenge. Zack didn’t need to know more than rudimentary Wutain to recognize that.

“They think we did this,” Sephiroth murmured, brows knotted as he watched. “Whatever the magic… it wasn’t them.” 

“I think Guernsey is still down there, sir,” Gerber spoke up quietly, “it could go badly if they find him.” 

“Yes, I heard him. Gerber, you’ll need to be the one to go get him. Your crystal running full bars?” 

“Always, sir.”

“Good man. Go. We will risk the ropes. If you can make it back up, do so. I will do what I can to… retrieve Schreiber. Fair, you will stay here. If there is trouble, your part remains the same.” 

“Yessir.” 

_Gods_ he wished he were a First. He knew the General would double back at the first sign of trouble, would throw his considerable skills into a fight against any number of angry ninjas to give his men enough time to get out. But damn it, he wished he could do more. 

Maybe Sephiroth could read minds because he clasped a hand on Zack’s arm for a brief moment. “I’m relying on you.”

With a quiet rustle, he leaped and caught some invisible ledge about them, scrabbling up without ropes or rappelling gear as though he were some kind of squirrel and twice as soundless. 

_How the fuck does he do that?_ Zack wondered, staring at the space the General had just been. The man could give the ninjas a run for their money. 

“Tell me about it,” Gerber murmured from his other side, who’d just finished clipping a second coil of rope prudently to his waist. “He makes the rest of us look bad.” 

“Stay safe down there.” 

“You too, brother.” Then Gerber swung down, and only the quiet zipping sound and the tension in the line were all the evidence that he’d been there at all. 

Zack hunkered down, trying to ignore the ice in his chest, trying to fight off the prickly sensation that ninjas were creeping up the walls like cave crawlers, all armed to the teeth, gunning for his heart’s blood. Was that what had happened to Schreiber? They hadn’t even heard the _suggestion_ of a fight and that was just… undignified. Also unsettling as hell.

Seconds passed, and then minutes began to tick by as well. The jitteriness in his limbs from the adrenaline began to fade and so the only thing left was the restless patter of his fingertips as he waited for something, anything to happen. Peering down, he watched the frenetic activity happening below trying to gauge some clue as to what was going on. 

It hadn’t taken long for the Wutains to organize. While he could still see a few figures down there, clustered around what was left of the dragon’s head, more had broken off, heading down other tunnels, sectioning themselves off so as better to hunt down the intruders. 

It was hard not to feel a little useless without a task to occupy him, but he was damned sure he wasn’t going against orders while they were coming up short-handed and the enemy kept filing in like ants. They might not all be the high-ranking whositwhatsis the intelligence warranted, but Zack knew firsthand that any sort of soldier could poke a big hole in you if you were distracted enough. 

“Zack.”

_GOOD FUCKING JACKRABBIT IN A HELL HOUSE._

He was very, very proud of himself that he had the wherewithal not to shriek in surprise, or boomerang his sword at the General’s head. Because it was a very near thing, the damned batman had popped up _behind_ him.

Sephiroth probably knew it too because there was a faint quirk at the corner of those criminally pretty lips, gone in a twinkling, that might have been unintentional amusement. When he looked again, the General’s face was a grim as Zack had ever seen it. Maybe he’d just imagined it. Like how he’d imagined the General calling him by his first name. 

\--Wait.

All right, so it was not the time to dwell on such things but Zack had words for the General just dropping these H-bombs on people and then acting as though it was no big deal. 

“There was another tunnel out,” Sephiroth murmured in explanation, coming forward to join Zack at the edge, taking care not to spill any stray pebbles down into the cavern below, “they are investigating the areas they found Schreiber very closely.”

He paused, and there was a sadness and not a little anger in his eyes. “I could not get him out without raising an alarm.” 

Zack thought it was particularly kind of Sephiroth to have thought of retrieving the dead man’s remains at all. It was probably also a positive thing to recognize that the General was not infallible, but it certainly wasn’t as comforting in their given situation. 

“The others, sir?” 

“It has been too long, I will go s--”

That was as far as he got before they heard a loud, triumphant cry, first from one voice, then spread to six, then a dozen more. 

_Oh no_.

With a swift movement, Sephiroth swept Zack backwards, shoving him hard against the rock wall as if he were trying to compact him further into the stone than physics would allow. Zack felt his joints groan at the pressure but he kept his mouth shut, fear sizzling up his spine like shocks of static. Had they found…?

SOLDIER hearing allowed both of them to hear Gerber’s distinct accents cursing the Wutains soundly, to pick him out in the cacophony. And Guernsey…

“Both of them,” Sephiroth swore under his breath, a quiet litany that would have delighted Zack under any other circumstance than the one they were currently in. 

There was a beat of silence where Zack could almost hear the gears grinding at lightning fast speed inside the General’s head, formulating, rejecting, and reformulating a new plan. When Sephiroth moved again, it was with quick, decisive movements. A knife appeared in his gloved hand as he bent down and severed the wiring Zack had so neatly tied up in three different places, and with a few small clicks and a little tugging, had pulled out some fiddly little electronic gizmo without ever even removing his gloves. He tossed it on the ground and stamped on it it, then swiftly kicked it away. Zack highly suspected that the entire apparatus was now rendered utterly useless. 

With that done, Sephiroth nudged Zack backwards into the tunnel, and then cut the ropes that Gerber had used to go after Guernsey. With a soft slither they vanished over the edge and splashed quietly into the water below. 

That done, Sephiroth was on his heels and the two of them melted back into the darkness as they raced for the exit. Zack’s throat was tight at the thought that they were leaving their men behind without even a fight. For a First, Gerber had been downright likable.

He’d known that as one of the rank and file of the army, SOLDIERs were valuable but ultimately expendable. But… like this?

As if he could hear Zack’s turbulent thoughts, Sephiroth spoke with quiet conviction, “They think we did this. They’ll be taken in for questioning, and I know where they will be. We will get them back, one way or another." 

Zack knew Sephiroth didn’t need to explain himself, and certainly not to a SOLDIER Second Class, but he took comfort in the fact that Sephiroth had offered even that much. 

Moving as swiftly and quietly as he knew how, Sephiroth close at his heels, Zack sped down the tunnel and tried not to feel like the dark walls were closing in on him. If only it were daylight and he could see some small crack of light up ahead, guiding him toward freedom. But no, there was only his SOLDIER eyes, picking out the bare features of the tunnel with what little scraps of ambient light there was, navigating the strange twisty turns, the utter sameness of one entrance to the next. 

He was glad that he had a good head for directions because while he was sure Sephiroth knew the way out and wouldn’t let him lead them astray, he also didn’t want to slow the both of them down by needing to course-correct every few steps. 

“I want to know what that was,” Sephiroth said quietly in the dark gloom as Zack smelled the first whiff of grass from the outside, heard the faint cricket song of the night, “I want to know what jeopardized this mission so badly that I may have lost three good men under my watch.” 

He didn’t say anything else, but Zack had the distinct impression that when Sephiroth found the source of that disturbance, be they man, monster, or god, he was going to drag them all the way back to the Shinra base by their intestines, and see how far the pieces could crawl. 

And by Hela herself, Zack was gonna help him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next up, a short interlude and a little bitty bit of a time skip just to keep things interesting.


	4. Past-Future Tense

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A big rock is about to fall down on the Planet and our heroes are determined to stop that from happening. But that's not until tomorrow and in the meantime... well, in the meantime, Sephiroth wants to see just how far Cloud will go.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Purrrrr. I've been working on this fic for aaaaages, and while this very mostly a Zack-fic, I absolutely love the times where Sephiroth and Cloud get to interact. Because they are glorious, and, let's be real, we looovvve a good love/hate ship. ;)

_Alone at last._

Cloud threw himself down on the bedrock with a groan, and then winced as the Ultima Weapon hit rock with a shrill _shiink!_ a moment later. He resisted the silly urge to turn it over, check it compulsively, cuddle it, call it pet names, and break out a sharpening stone. 

He wasn’t going to be that guy. 

Unlatching it from his back, he set it down gently on the stones next to him. It glowed, sitting there, bathed in the dying embers of the sunset, a deep, eternal blue that bled down into colorless crystal. It was beautiful. And it was his, _his_ in a way that meant more somehow, than its simple monster origins.

(Okay, it’d been an enormous monster, and had probably cost him its full weight in X potions and phoenix down, but at this point in their adventure, that was all just old hat, wasn’t it?)

Whatever. The point was that it was special. It was his last sword on the long, monster-riddled quest to find something strong enough to save the world with. And this last was as special to him now as the other, as his first. 

On a whim, he unsheathed that one too. The original Buster sword - plain and pitted in places now, but with an edge like a razor and a weight that took the strength of a SOLDIER to properly handle. 

This was his too. Sure, you could argue that it was still Zack’s (Cloud wouldn’t fight that), but patchwork memory or not, this sword had simply always been there. There’d been others. He’d found them, won them, bought them, even been given a few in the slow, incremental trek to where he stood now. But they just hadn’t been the same. 

If he ever got around to retiring, these two would be the only ones left to hang on his wall. He could sit and point to them with his crabby old man finger and wax poetic about the adventures of his glory days. 

\--He could, but he probably wouldn’t because that wasn’t really a Cloud kind of thought. Or was it? It was so hard to be sure, especially now when he realized the full extent of the messiness inside his own head.

Besides, who’s to say that he could really call these his glory days?

Wandering the length and breadth of the Planet with a ragtag mob of eco-terrorists, ninjas, and vampires. Racing after a man who was bent on destroying everything. Outpacing the corporation that would probably do the same thing, only slower. Fighting the WEAPONs that were supposed to have risen to help _stop_ the calamity, but were instead hellbent on wiping out the entirety of the human race as well. 

...Falling into the Lifestream itself and taking refuge in the very recesses of his own mind. Failing a woman he loved and letting her die.

And now… waiting to make the last descent down into the Northern Crater. Finally, he would face the man he had hated- _loved?_ - ** _hated_ ** for so long. 

The soft groan he let out was one of weariness as he leaned his weight back on his elbows, ignoring the bite of the rocks into his skin, and closed his eyes against the faint red glow of the dying sun. It wasn’t just the long slog of the days before, he was just so damned _tired_ \- every step forward to their destination felt like lead weights in his boots, a deep unsettling heaviness in his heart. And worse, he couldn’t let the others know, couldn’t even let them think it. Because tomorrow…

The last time they’d been here… he’d lost his mind. He’d behaved as blindly and without agency as any of Sephiroth’s dark-cloaked puppet clones. And he’d given Sephiroth exactly what Sephiroth needed. He couldn’t hide, at least from himself, the deep-seated fear that it might happen again. 

How could he know whether or not he’d lose them all? How could he know whether or not it might all be his fault?

“Cloud?”

His eyes snapped open, but his brain knew this voice, even though it was pitched uncharacteristically low, almost hesitantly quiet. He glanced over to watch her approach. Even after a day’s journey trudging along with a pack on her shoulders and the sun beating down on her skin, Tifa was beautiful - lush and curvy with legs like a Valkyrie. Her rusty red shoes made soft clacking noises against the gravel and pebbles skittered liberally over the rock face in her wake.

She was many wonderful things, but a ninja, Tifa was not.

“Yeah?”

“Can I—?” she gestured to the spot next to him, and wordlessly he waved her down. A moment or two later, she was settled on the rock next to him, one hand running through his hair - under the pretense of patting the dust and gravel off the soft spikes. He closed his eyes and allowed it, recognizing the need for a touchstone better than anyone.

They'd already been through so much. But the story wasn't finished yet. His hair and his dignity could afford to be treated like a chocobo petting zoo for a little while.

Her fingers faltered, then splayed limply against his scalp. “What do you think will happen? You know… tomorrow?”

Cloud opened his mouth, a stirring speech about freedom, victory, and honor bubbling automatically to his lips… and then stopped. 

Addressing everyone was one thing - they’d taken him on as their unspoken leader and he understood the importance of that role. But… Tifa, more than anyone else up to and probably including himself, knew everything. And she was unfortunately equipped with a supersonic intuition on all things Cloud; she’d _know_ if he lied even a little bit. 

She’d dived after him into his psyche and pulled him back to the surface, brought him back to _himself_. He was grateful for that, truly. He might’ve spent the rest of his life a mumbling, hollow-eyed vegetable in a chair. But… who knew what sort of secrets she might also have stumbled upon in the closed-off corners of his mind?

Perhaps it was for his own good that she kept her own counsel about what had happened. 

Whatever. For all that she’d walked through most of her life with every gift that godsall knew how to give, she wasn’t perfect. Cloud tried not to be unfair, and it really wasn’t very nice to dwell on, but at times he couldn’t help the memory of betrayal that washed over him, clouding his thoughts of her. The memory of learning how she’d _lied_ to him, just to ease her own guilt, just to make their adult relationship more comfortable, as though it could wipe their childhood clean. 

“ _Best friends, right, Cloud?”_

Why had he had to learn the truth from _Sephiroth_ of all people? It had shaken him more than he’d let on. 

Sometimes the littlest things still stung the hardest, even long after forgiveness had been given and got. But he tried because he loved her and he owed her that.

“I don’t know,” he said truthfully. He sat up, eyes fixed on the ruddy glow of the sun, burning even fainter now under the sickly glow of Meteor off in the distance. “I’d _like_ to think… that we’ll be able to stop that.” 

There was no more room for mistakes now. They had to wrest the power of Holy back; they had to kill Sephiroth, destroy every last piece of Jenova, once and for all. And even that might not be enough. 

A strangely bitter smile passed over her face as she clasped her arms around her knees, following his gaze. It would have been a childish pose, but Cloud had long since given up on telling her that she flashed her panties at anything and everything when she did it. She just nodded, kept on doing it, and didn’t seem to care no matter who or what was watching. 

He figured she had a good enough left- and right-hook (this without continuing on to confirm the brutal effectiveness of her roundhouse kicks) to be fully capable of taking care of herself and fending off any and all unwanted attentions. He could also (usually) make it through one of her Limits without blushing like a tomato. 

“Not exactly living up to the expectations of our illustrious leader, are you, Cloud?” 

That got a low chuckle out of him. Maybe she hadn’t really wanted the truth after all. “What a way to inspire the troops, huh?” 

“Exactly.”

“Think I’ll be any better at it in the morning?”

“You’ll be great,” she told him firmly. Then paused, and a small smile quirked the corner of her lips. “And you know, you’ve still got time to practice.”

The silence fell like a curtain between the two of them again shortly after as they watched the sunset slowly dip down into twilight. A few insects chirped here and there as though in defiance of that unnatural stillness. But the whole Planet was waiting for the day to come, and every creature that walked, swam, or slithered on it seemed to know it. The quiet came back and stayed unbroken.

Tifa shuffled her feet in the pebbles again before she leaned her head against his shoulder and he let her, even going so far as to wrap an arm around her shoulders, draw her closer to a more comfortable spot against his chest. She hummed a small sound of contentment and he felt his heart warm, felt something other than the guilt that he held so close to his chest. 

“Can we stay like this?” she asked finally, “Just for a little while?”

“...If you like.” 

Time didn’t seem to matter after that. Cloud’s attention shifted back to the sky, watched the infinitesimal crawl of darkness spread up from the trees and climb up the giant bowl of the sky, watched as the stars came out, weak and white against Meteor’s unnatural glow. 

Tifa was long asleep by then, breathing quiet and slow, warm against his side, and he was alone with his thoughts. 

And because he was Cloud, his thoughts took him where he didn’t want them to go. Back to the guilt and the shame, to all the people he couldn’t save and the mistakes he couldn’t fix. Shinra. Jessie. Those above and below the Plate when it decimated Sector Seven… 

Aeris. And Zack. And… Sephiroth.

When had he started feeling this way? So… responsible… for everything? That it was all his own damn fault? 

And would killing Sephiroth, wiping Jenova off the map, would that end it all? Would he remember how to be happy then? 

He didn’t know when it’d happened, when the substance of himself had all drained away and left him empty inside - not even the false comfort of righteous anger or sadness or fear or anguish left to fill in the cracks. The only things holding him together now were duty and friendship… and he prayed to any and all gods listening, that that was enough to see this thing through.

“You reek of indecision, Cloud.” 

The Ultima Weapon was in his hand even before the voice had finished speaking - the soft low silk of sound, the knowing drawl laced with knife-edge cruelty. Cloud’s hand closed around Tifa’s shoulder, shaking her. 

She didn’t move. 

His stomach turned to ice as he looked down at her, at this girl who had spent months on the road and who would wake on a dime at the first hint of danger, limp and still at his side. Then his entire body seized up and he was struck with how quickly the rage swept through his body, energizing him with fury as he faced Sephiroth. “What did you do to her?!?” 

_First Aeris, now—?!_

“Peace, Cloud, she merely dreams.” 

The smile that twisted the man’s lips was ugly, taunting. Cloud had never known any stronger impulse than the desire to smash that perfect face with its perfect bow lips and its perfect straight teeth until Sephiroth _looked_ as much of a monster as he was inside.

The little whimper that escaped Tifa’s lips was barely audible, but neither Cloud nor Sephiroth could have missed it. Sephiroth’s smile widened. “Unpleasant dreams, I’m afraid…”

“Let her go.”

The other man’s voice dropped even lower, dark silk on even darker velvet. Cloud didn’t miss the baleful glance he cast on Tifa’s sleeping form, acknowledging and dismissing her in the space of a heartbeat, as if she were nothing. Arrogant, considering here was a girl who had struck out at him once before and lived. 

“Do you need her to stop me, Cloud?”

Cloud’s hand tightened on the hilt of his sword, even as he laid Tifa gently down on the rock face, an action that would have, if nothing else, woken her completely if Sephiroth hadn’t… _done_ something to her. “I don’t need anyone else to help me kill you.”

 _Brave words_ , he thought wryly to himself as he watched Sephiroth’s eyebrows rise in response. _At least one of your puppets is going to go out with a spine._

“So you say.”

Sephiroth took another step towards him, the crunch of gravel underfoot and the clatter of pebbles cementing his realness, the threat of his presence. Cloud knew as well as any man left alive how soundlessly Sephiroth could move when he wanted to, even when he’d only been human. Slowly, he unsheathed his sword, the gleam of starlight glimmering on Masamune’s impossible length. 

Cloud charged at him, thinking, _hoping,_ that this was only an image, a sending… hell, he’d take a hallucination. He knew in the back of his mind that Sephiroth, the real Sephiroth, was still somewhere down there in that crater, in that cave, and this could only at worst be another clone. 

But… he moved like him. Sephiroth sidestepped Cloud’s first downward slash with the rustle of leather and the grace of a dancer, Masamune singing through the air in a parry that nearly caused him to stumble. Cloud doubled back with another swing, the Ultima Weapon moving like a part of his body, perfectly balanced as though its weight was nothing. He drew strength from that, that he was meant to do this. 

And Sephiroth never hesitated. Although his sword was suited to lightning fast strikes from a distance, engaging, withdrawing, jabbing and shearing, he kept this fight close, that smile never leaving his lips. And Cloud found himself at a disadvantage, too close to really swing, moving too fast to gain real momentum. As for the weight difference… 

The fight ended abruptly with an aborted scream - the hot, sharp pain of steel, the blood that spattered his own face, the cold crunch as Masamune punched past bone. Cloud looked down to see Sephiroth hefting his sword at the midway point, blood welling up in fat drops from his own gloved fist where it closed around the blade. His other hand shot out to grab Cloud’s wrist and _twist_ it, hard enough to make him cry out, hard enough - and he would never have done it if he hadn’t still had Masamune shoved right through his trapezius - to _drop his sword_. 

Cloud saw his death playing out the moment he heard the clatter of the Weapon falling to the ground, the rough _shhhnkk_ of it skittering in the gravel as Sephiroth kicked it out of the way. The strangled noise that made it past his choked throat was everything he couldn’t express in words - fury, shame, disbelief, and utter humiliation. 

And then Sephiroth’s hands closed around his throat, hauling him up until there was only air beneath his boots and none making it down into his lungs. Then the rest was swept away in the sudden shock of fear. This couldn’t be how it ended… could it??

“Is it too hard? The task of killing of me?” Sephiroth’s voice was barely a whisper, his lips so close Cloud could feel his breath ghost over the sweat-soaked skin of his forehead like a mockery of gentleness. When Sephiroth spoke, it was slow and unhurried - at odds with the fact that his hands around Cloud’s throat were like a band of iron, and the insane laughter danced like fire in those snake-pupiled eyes. “Where are all those brave words now?”

“I—” Cloud managed to gasp out before he was quickly cut off.

“You keep wanting to change things. Even so far away, even asleep and waiting for the moment the Lifestream spills into my hands, I can feel it, distracting me, whispering at me with words of sadness and indecision and regret. After all this, you cannot be content with what already _is._ ”

Sephiroth shook him like a doll, hauling him up even higher in the air as Cloud struggled to hold himself up with both hands, struggled to break that unbreakable grip. How could a clone be this strong?

“You have lost your focus, Cloud. And this is what will kill you.” 

The words were matter-of-fact and to the point, falling on him rocks like because fuck him they were _true_ . Even as the blood pounded hard in his ears, threatened to cloud his vision over in red, even as his lips tried to form words and instead made a sad, ragged sound as he tried, futilely, to fucking _breathe_. 

This was how it was going to end and it was so goddamn _sad_. 

Sephiroth dropped him suddenly to the stones, and Cloud found enough breath to grunt in pain as the impact shoved the sword further into him at an oblique angle, twisting it in the meat of his pectoral muscle. It left him a gagging, coughing, pitiful mess at Sephiroth’s feet.

Nor was the madman done with him yet, because he reached down with a stony face and wrenched the blade out with brutal efficiency and a sharp sucking sound that make Cloud gasp. Undaunted, it seemed Cloud had been spared the ignominy of death by strangulation only for Sephiroth to get a better grip on him. A moment later, both wrists were clamped in one of Sephiroth’s hands - immovable, even when he lashed out with his legs at the soft parts of Sephiroth’s body. 

\--There were apparently no soft parts on Sephiroth’s body. The man was made of stone. 

“Do you really think that if you could go back, somehow things would change? That you could…” and here Sephiroth couldn’t hold back the laugh, “that you could have _saved_ me? 

“--Or maybe you could have saved that Ancient?” 

Cloud didn’t think that Sephiroth was particularly _worth_ saving right that moment. But Aeris… Sephiroth didn't deserve to even speak her name.

He also hadn’t known that his eyes had filled with hot, angry tears until he felt Sephiroth dip forward, silver hair like heavy silk brushing against his skin - soft, cool even. It sparked a memory, unbidden, of that hair draped along his body, the weight of it like an embrace all on its own, sliding across his skin. Gods, _what--?_

Then Sephiroth’s tongue flicked out, the tip of it touching the tear that slid down his cheek and the memory disintegrated under the weight of his revulsion. He pulled away before Cloud could cringe back, struggling, _hating_ him and hating himself. 

And there was something new in Sephiroth’s eyes, overshadowing the manic gleam. There was a faint hint of surprise and amusement there - it softened the sharp angles of his face, the dark shadows underneath his eyes, and for a single, solitary moment he looked like the Sephiroth from… before. The one he’d have moved mountains for. 

Gods! He didn’t want to see that! He certainly didn't want to remember that betrayal, that loss, or the fact that the man he was trying so desperately to kill was the man he’d once-- _no._

Sephiroth’s eyes missed nothing. “So you do. You want to change what was.”

“Who wouldn’t?” Cloud ground out, jerking fruitlessly at Sephiroth’s grip, enraged by his own weakness, and stung into speaking the truth. “You’ve made your point - you think I’m going to fail, that I’ll never compare to you.”

“You don’t.”

“And you don’t know anything!”

He couldn’t believe it, couldn’t _let_ himself believe it, not when there were others counting on him. The defiance felt good, even in his awful, impossible situation hanging like a side of meat from a butcher hook. Given the chance, given so many chances, take him back to the Temple of the Ancients and he could have stood over Aeris, guarded her, could have stopped that single, inevitable thrust of death from the darkness. Take him back to Nibelheim and he would have kept going, would have cut down the madman before he had even begun. He could be strong enough. He _could_. 

“Interesting…” 

Sephiroth couldn’t read minds, but he looked at Cloud with those inhuman eyes as though he could hear every word. He cocked his head, almost birdlike, as though listening to voices Cloud couldn’t. 

And then he let Cloud go and Cloud felt himself falling, falling, an impossible, dizzying feeling as the image of Sephiroth wavered - for a brief moment there was a rush of relief. It was only a fake, a clone, and Sephiroth wasn’t really here - or maybe he was dreaming again and Sephiroth was playing with his mind and if he could only just wake up--

But Sephiroth was laughing - the kind of laughter that ate at Cloud’s insides because gods he could _remember_ , remember a time when he’d wished more than anything to hear the sound of General Sephiroth’s laughter… but not like this. He’d thrown his head back, baring the long, pale line of his throat, and his shoulders shook with it before he let his head fall forward, shading his eyes, shaking it from side to side as the laughter faded into a faint smile. 

“Then go back,” he said simply, the crazed gleam filling his eyes once more. Cloud felt the build-up of raw magic, the scent of ozone that preceded a summon, and scrambled clumsily for his sword. Not the Ultima Weapon, it was too far, but the Buster sword… 

Sephiroth ignored him, continuing to stand still as stone, as if he hadn’t even noticed Cloud was armed and angry enough to slice him in half, clone or not. If only the ground would just… stop… falling… 

Out of instinct, he called up a Cure, sealing the clean hole in a wash of green, even as the ground continued to shift beneath his feet like sand or sludge. Sephiroth never moved, but he was haloed in a nimbus of green, as if he had called up his own Cure… no, that wasn’t right, it was bigger than that, it was--

“Try and change the past, Cloud. Come to me. Kill me. Show me your grand future.” 

Cloud opened his mouth to scream as the sand pulled him down, clinging to his skin, felt the bubble and flare of Lifestream pouring up out of the earth, surrounding him in a clinging froth, like the first touch of the surf before the deeper pull of the ocean. He shouldn’t be able to do this. Gods damn him, that’s what they were fighting for, so that Sephiroth could _never_ have access to this kind of power. 

But it was building, faster and faster, this seething tide of Lifestream that licked and tugged and pulled - he could hear the Cetra and they were _singing_. They were _agreeing_ with Sephiroth, and how could that be? He was the _enemy!_

Farther and farther away, Sephiroth’s eyes watched him with that cool arrogance, that hateful look of _knowing_ that made Cloud want to cave his face in. 

Then the surge pulled him under, dragged him down deep into that well of green, of pure, moving power, and the singing surrounded him, flowed through his mind and resounded like church bells in his head; hundreds and thousands, no, _millions_ of voices sang in chorus together, all parts of a single whole. 

_He’s waiting for you to come and find him…_

_He’s waiting for you to come and kill him…_

_He’s waiting for you to come and deliver him…_

_He’s waiting for you to come and save him…_

**_Save him, Cloud…_ **

That last… _Aeris…?_

He was screaming and he couldn’t even hear himself because the roar of Sephiroth’s and the Cetra’s magic exploded around him, tearing the ground away from him and he was _moving,_ flying, the air was rushing past him in a shrill screech of sound.

How was he fit to save anyone… if he hadn’t even been able to save _her?_

There might have been an answer, a whisper in the back of his mind that he could hear past the screaming of the wind in his ears. He could _feel_ her presence, like a brush of sweetness and warmth and the faint scent of flowers as he flew through the nothingness, in the cool of the Lifestream that washed over him and carried him along with it. _It’s all connected, Cloud._

But it was as gone as fast as it had come, and he was left with only the howling of air as the noise reached a crescendo that he screamed against, couldn’t bear, couldn’t guard himself against because his arms wouldn’t _move_ and the world was exploding a second time, smashing through time and space and he didn’t know what else, and he was blinded by the white.

For a moment the rushing stopped and it was like he hung motionless in midair, the silence as loud as the screaming before he began to _fall_ , and the darkness rushed past him, taking him to oblivion.

Through the maelstrom, he heard Sephiroth's voice, call out one last time:

**_I’m waiting._ **

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next up, another big rock falls on the Planet. (Spoilers: it's Cloud. Cloud is the big rock.)


End file.
